IDL Font question

Hi,
Some colleagues have sent some plots which they generated using IDL
(boo!!! hiss!! :D), and they look quite dissimilar to my matplotlib
ones. I would like to mimic their layout as much as possible, which so
far is a success. The only problem is that I don't know what font to
use. In IDL, I believe it is called "Roman" (there's an smudged
example here: <http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~warner/IDL5220/HW4w.jpg>).
Does anyone know a suitable alternative?

Thanks!
Jose

IDL uses the Hershey vector fonts
<IT-tjenester ved IFI - Institutt for informatikk;

The problem is that these are not trutype fonts, so the easiest solution is probably to find some free sans-serif font that looks close to Hershey on a free font site.

HTH,
Gary R.

Jose Gomez-Dans wrote:

···

Hi,
Some colleagues have sent some plots which they generated using IDL
(boo!!! hiss!! :D), and they look quite dissimilar to my matplotlib
ones. I would like to mimic their layout as much as possible, which so
far is a success. The only problem is that I don't know what font to
use. In IDL, I believe it is called "Roman" (there's an smudged
example here: <http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~warner/IDL5220/HW4w.jpg&gt;\).
Does anyone know a suitable alternative?

Thanks!
Jose

Not quite the answer you were looking for, but a completely different
approach, if you can ask them to resend the data, is to get them to
save out a postscript file, which IDL can do. Then you can edit the
components with a tool like inkscape and standardise the fonts across
all graphs.

Angus.

···

On 01/11/2007, Jose Gomez-Dans <jgomezdans@...287...> wrote:

Hi,
Some colleagues have sent some plots which they generated using IDL
(boo!!! hiss!! :D), and they look quite dissimilar to my matplotlib
ones. I would like to mimic their layout as much as possible, which so
far is a success. The only problem is that I don't know what font to
use. In IDL, I believe it is called "Roman" (there's an smudged
example here: <http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~warner/IDL5220/HW4w.jpg&gt;\).
Does anyone know a suitable alternative?

--
AJC McMorland, PhD Student
Physiology, University of Auckland

It depends exacly what you need, but this might help:

Ghostscript comes with the Hershey fonts. You should be able to choose an appropriate font name in Matplotlib, e.g. Hershey-Gothic-English, and produce a Postscript file using an appropriate backend. You should then be able to convert that to one of any number of formats (bitmaps and PDF) using Ghostscript. Note the use of the word should, I haven't tried this myself!

- Andrew

Gary Ruben wrote:

···

IDL uses the Hershey vector fonts
<IT-tjenester ved IFI - Institutt for informatikk;

The problem is that these are not trutype fonts, so the easiest solution is probably to find some free sans-serif font that looks close to Hershey on a free font site.

HTH,
Gary R.

Jose Gomez-Dans wrote:
  

Hi,
Some colleagues have sent some plots which they generated using IDL
(boo!!! hiss!! :D), and they look quite dissimilar to my matplotlib
ones. I would like to mimic their layout as much as possible, which so
far is a success. The only problem is that I don't know what font to
use. In IDL, I believe it is called "Roman" (there's an smudged
example here: <http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~warner/IDL5220/HW4w.jpg&gt;\).
Does anyone know a suitable alternative?

Thanks!
Jose