graphic drawing tools

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

"RAUBER, JOEL" wrote:
> Nice drawings!  I'm curious as to what
> drawing package you use to produce the drawings.

Hoo, boy.  Short question, long answer:

1) They all started out in idraw, which is the ancestor
of drawtool, part of the ivtools package.

Advantages
 -- free
 -- the nicest user-interface of any drawing program I've seen
 -- open (and not-too-complicated) file format, so you can
    write programs to do graphics
 -- "comdraw" program provides another way to control the
    graphics engine from a program
 -- open source, so if there's a bug I can fix it

Disadvantages
 -- wedded to RGB.  Not so good if you want to publish something
    on real paper (which demands something like CMYK or, better,
    something device-independent like CIELab)


2) Mainly to achieve device-independent color I converted
them all to Adobe Photoshop using ps2ai.

Advantages
 -- Smart about RGB/CMYK/CIELab color-space
 -- Powerful editing capabilities

Disadvantages
 -- Wizard-friendly user interface.  Muggle-unfriendly.
 -- No good way to control it from a program
 -- Arcane file formats that change from version to version.
 -- A bit pricey.


3) I wanted a way to _automatically_ convert each figure
from postscript (vector graphics) to gif (bitmap).
I "could" have gotten good results using Illustrator, but due
to the lack of an automation facility that would have meant
point-and-clicking my way through 250+ images, and that's
not my style.

ImageMagick advertises all the desired features, but
 -- alas its color-space profile handling is broken
 -- it invokes ghostscript to convert postscript to bitmaps,
    and at some point it becomes simpler to call gs yourself.

The netpbm toolkit is dumb about color-space, but since
ImageMagick is broken in this department it comes out
about the same.

So my current recommendation is:
  *) drawtool and/or Illustrator
  *) ghostscript (basic rendering)
  *) netpbm or ImageMagick (bitmap format conversion, cropping, etc.)
  *) tifficc     (color-space conversion)
  *) a bunch of custom scripts to invoke the tools in tricky ways
     to perform anti-aliasing etc.

For more information:
  http://www.ivtools.org/ivtools/
  http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/main.html
  http://www.mayura.com/ps2ai.htm
  http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
  http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/
  http://www.imagemagick.org/
  http://www.littlecms.com/

Also: A variety of .icc files to specify device color
profiles are downloadable from Adobe for free.  Note
.icc is synonymous with .icm ("Index Color Model").

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of Placido,
Luciano, or José.

This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.