|Preparing Illustrations and Graphics
|Use of Colour
|PDF, like postscript, supports colour,
therefore colour will be visible on the screen when viewing the proceedings.
Authors should not forget however, that the proceedings may also be
published in book form in black and white. The printer will
render colours in greyscales and patterns and authors should inspect the
black and white version of their printed paper to ensure that information is
not lost due to the lack of colour.
|It can be very frustrating for readers
to have their computer blocked whilst certain pages are laboriously painted
on the screen and even more annoying for other users when a printer is
blocked by a file which takes 30 minutes to print. Proceedings editors
therefore have to devote a lot of time to ensure that the published files do
not cause such problems. In the following sections some recommendations for
authors to diagnose and cure problem files are presented.
|Typically, graphics files which have been generated from programs
like tracking simulations, where the figure is made up from very large
numbers of points or vectors cause problems - the PDF software is unable
to compress the files and therefore when the page is displayed there are
millions of elements to paint on the screen. There are two methods which
authors can use to check if a file may be a problem: firstly, does the file
take a very long time to print ? Secondly, if the PostScript file is
displayed (using Ghostview or GhostScript on a PC, for example) does it take
a long time to display ? The latter method can also be used to identify one
figure from among several that is causing problems.
- Where the author has access to the
software used to produce the figure, investigate if there are parameters
which can be adjusted to reduce the number of points which are plotted
(averaging, downsampling etc.).
- Alternatively, reduce the figure to a bitmapped image. This is a method
which allows the final view of the figure to be essentially the same but
which uses very much less space. There are a number of software packages
which are commonly available which allow this kind of manipulation: Adobe
Illustrator and Photoshop, for example. On UNIX systems one can use
ImageMagic. With Windows7 one has the Snipping tool which can be used to
convert part of a display to a bitmap and save the image as a PNG (the
preferred format). The figure can be imported to these
packages and then re-inserted into the