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Publication Quality Image Files [.TIFFs] of Waveform Graphs or Waveform Charts?

I'm familiar with the Knowledge Base Article 2PP7CM7Y, How Can I Save a Front Panel Control to a JPEG, PNG, or BMP File?


My problem is that the resulting pictures are nowhere near publication quality [i.e. the kind of thing you could import into Acrobat for submission to an academic or technical journal]. For instance, I've attached a PNG of an Electrocardiogram [ECG], called "ecg.png", that, in all honesty, doesn't deserve to be posted on a website, much less imported into an Acrobat document. As far as I can tell, I'm using all the high
est settings [24-bit color, no compression].


Does Labview have any other utilities for saving to industry standard image formats, especially high-resolution TIFFs? I know the information is there, because when I print the VI's Front Panel to our 600dpi laser print, I get really beautiful, publication quality prints. My suspicion is that whoever wrote the "Invoke Node/Get Image" VI [and/or the various "Graphics Format/Write File" VIs] simply took a snapshot of the graphic card's [VERY low resolution] video buffer, rather than calling the underlying software logic that gets invoked when you print to a 600DPI laser printer. Is there any way I can get access to that underlying software logic?


Thanks!

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Have you tried printing to a postscript file, instead of printing to a printer? You might be able to convert a postscript file to a tiff file using professinal image processing applications, such as Photoshop.

George Zou
http://gtoolbox.yeah.net
George Zou
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Is there a way to do that without having a postscript printer and its drivers installed?
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You don't need the printer, but you do need a driver.

George Zou
http://gtoolbox.yeah.net
George Zou
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How about enlarging the the image on the screen before getting its image?

I'm thinking about graph that fill 3X12 screens?

Ben
Retired Senior Automation Systems Architect with Data Science Automation LabVIEW Champion Knight of NI and Prepper LinkedIn Profile YouTube Channel
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Okay, I installed the HP PostScript drivers, but, as far as I can tell, there is no option to 'Save to File.' [Such an option may be there somewhere, but I looked all over the place, and I couldn't find it...]

Besides, the idea of saving to PostScript, and then running some program like 'ps2png' or 'ps2tiff' is not very appealing to me, for at least two reasons:

1) It's very batch-file-ish in nature, i.e. I've got to download some monstrosity like Ghostscript, get it installed, get it configured [no trivial task in and of itself, believe you me], then write some batch-file-ish thingamabob to open the PostScript file and process it - I'd much prefer to [at the very worst] make a call straight to a DLL from within a Labview VI. But that's o
nly the start of my woes; once I've got a PostScript file, I've got to figure out some way to cut just the picture of the Waveform Graph from the larger picture of the VI window - I suppose I could use some sort of a Clipping Path or an Encapsulated PostScript Bounding Box, but at this point we've clearly crossed over into the realm of what I would call 'hideously ugly, grotesquely inelegant, batch-file-ish hack.' Plus, my gut instinct is that it would take a bare minimum of a week or more to get such a thing up and running efficiently, when, if I could make a call straight to the Labview printing infrastructure, I could do it in just a few minutes.

2) It's very, very difficult to venture into the realm of PostScript software [especially Ghostscript] and keep your project from becoming contaminated by the GPL, or worse [the Aladdin license agreement ain't exactly a stroll on the beach].
 
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There is an option "Print to file" for my HP1600DeskJet. I did this before. I can set this option on the print dialog window manually, or create a print drive with print to file option.

To get rid of background and edges: create a subvi, pass your waveform graph to it, set the size of the subvi window to the waveform graph, no edge, no bars, and set the subvi to print after run.

Microsoft doesn't support write to a 48 bit file. So you have to find a third party library to write to a file anyway.

George Zou
http://gtoolbox.yeah.net
George Zou
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Greg McKaskle provided another way. See this link:

http://exchange.ni.com/servlet/ProcessRequest?RHIVEID=101&RPAGEID=135&HOID=506500000008000000F7C50000&USEARCHCONTEXT_CATEGORY_0=_49_%24_6_&USEARCHCONTEXT_CATEGORY_S=0&UCATEGORY_0=_49_%24_6_&UCATEGORY_S=0

EMF should be better than raster image file format (such as BMP, PNG, TIFF, etc).

Invoke Node/Get Image uses raster format. The highest resolution is the screen resolution. While the print subroutine probably using vector format.

George Zou
http://gtoolbox.yeah.net
George Zou
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