IP7 printing woes: How to export vector graphics into PDFs?

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Dear Igoristas,

After taking the step of upgrading to IP7 it took only very few changes to get my old experiments running again. However, I can not get the results out of Igor the way I used to anymore. My established workflow called for automatically loading a lot of data, have Igor churning through it and creating pretty result graphics. The graphics were collected in a notebook and then printed on a third party PDF-printer for documentation and distribution. It took some fiddling around, but I had found a set of notebook picture modes that resulted in a nice blend of high quality and small file size (see attached pdf).

Now on Igor Pro 7 the resulting files are much uglier and larger than they used to be, and no amount of trial and error on my part can convince Igor to not render everything as horribly compressed jpegs in the resulting pdf file. Us imaging engineers like to zoom in and enhance, we can't do that with so many compression artifacts!

Has anyone of you an idea on how to best proceed here? Are there plans for a new rendering pipeline in the works or should I ditch the notebook printing in favour of exporting each graph seperately and feed them into a LaTex script? For now I can stay with trusty old IP6, but I would like to know what is the best long term solution.

Instead of the resulting IP7-PDF I have attached the experiment that I used to create it, so you can play around with it and find a solution or cross check whether this is an OS related issue. Oh, and using device independend bitmaps seems to crash IP7 when printing.

Best regards,
Jan Notebook_printing_IP6.pdf (987.89 KB) NotebookPrinting.zip (5.94 MB)
Please use the Help->Contact Support menu item in Igor 7 to send your question to our support team directly.

Please send a separate message about the crash with information on how to reproduce it. We'll do our best to fix it.

April 3, 2017 at 07:33 pm - Permalink

As aclight says, this sounds like something WaveMetrics can help with. FWIW, I only export graphics using Layouts and haven't noticed any changes Igor 6 -> 7. Layouts are now multipage in IP7 so they could be your solution?

April 3, 2017 at 09:49 pm - Permalink

I'd like to second the suggestion of using multipage layouts. When doing so, try using SaveGraphics as PDF rather than using the printer method. To do so, you may want to use a command like this:
SavePICT/O/E=-8/EF=1/PGR=(1,-1)/W=(0,0,0,0)

The /W part is if you want the entire page rather than just the subset containing objects.

I also got good results printing to PDF using the Microsoft print to PDF driver (Win10.)

Printing now goes through the Qt framework rather than native code and consequently platform specific formats such as EMF are not supported. SVG is a cross-platform vector format and PNG is cross-platform lossles bitmap. If your data is mainly image, use PNG and if mainly vector graphics, use SVG.

In looking at this, I have discovered a number of issue that I will need to investigate so I may have more later.

It would be useful if you could attach the pdf you get from IP7 so I can compare with what i get here.

I believe the crash involving DIB in a notebook has been fixed in the current overnight build. Note that PNG is the preferable bitmap format.

The issue with the half filled color scale is clearly a bug.

The contour closing code can be turned off using
SetIgorOption TestContourFill= 0

This lasts for the duration of the Igor session.

Larry Hutchinson
WaveMetrics
support@WaveMetrics.com

April 8, 2017 at 10:40 am - Permalink