Re: nice b&w EPS from Gnumeric charts?

[Richard Bumby <bumby math rutgers edu>]

Jeffery von Ronne wrote:

> Does anyone know of a good way to get nice black & white EPS from
> Gnumeric charts?  I've got some charts in Gnumeric that I want to
> include in PhD dissertation (which is written latex), but I'm having 
> trouble getting something decent out of Gnumeric.
>
> I tried the "Save as" function, which allows PNGs, JPEGs, and SVGs.
> PNGs and JPEGs are, of course, inadequate because they're raster
> format and need to be made huge in order to have sufficient quality.
> But the SVG export is also inadequate because it doesn't support the
> patterns on my bars in my barchart, and since my dissertation needs to
> be black and white I need the patterns in order to distinguish the
> different items in the legend.
>
> The other thing I tried was to do a "print to file" and then convert
> that to EPS, but the file resulting file is huge and doesn't look very
> nice in "gv."
>
> Is it possible to get a nice EPS out of a Gnumeric chart?  
> (I'm using Gnumeric 1.5.2; I was using 1.4.3, but I upgraded
> to see if that would help, but it didn't seem to.)
>
>  
Although gnumeric charts are now good enough to use in a PhD 
dissertation, you might prefer to export the data in  a format that can 
be used by your favorite drawing program.  You can then add items with 
that program that might not be easy to include in the gnumeric chart.  
For example, I regularly post scatter plots of grades on two components 
of one of my courses along with a trend line showing how one grade 
predicts the other and other lines showing regions of course grades. 
Mixing two types of graphs in a single plot with just the right extent 
for each line is troublesome in a spreadsheet chart, but is easily done 
in gnuplot. 

A drawing program is also likely to produce more efficient EPS since its 
output routine will be tuned to that type of image. 

Current versions of TeX can include figures in other formats (e.g. 
png).  You may also find that you can get better results using a 
different format for your figure.  In particular, you shouldn't dismiss 
png without trying it.  It uses compression, so one of my scatter plots 
with 75 points, labeled axes, a trend line and lines separating grade 
uses only 4310 bytes.

-- RT Bumby
  Rutgers University Mathematics Dept.
  http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~bumby