Chromatography Forum

I have to provide .TIFF files for publication . Generally, I copy the chromatogram from Chemstation into Microsoft Powerpoint, then label it up. But here my problems start. There is an option to save directly from Powerpoint as a .tif file, but then it ends up in really low resolution.

One of my colleagues has a program called Illustrator (?) . He loads in the Powerpoint files, fiddles around with them and then saves them as .tif files. They end up as huge 15megabyte files, but they are acceptable. However, this is very laborious, and an imposition on him.

Does anyone have a better way of doing this-preferably which does not involve me having to buy a copy of Illustrator and learning how to use it?

Hi Victor,
I use the MicroSoft Office Image writer driver to create TIFFs & MDIs.


http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-11184- ... ID=2035519

Start | Settings | Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs | Microsoft Office
[Edition] 2003 | Change | Add or Remove Features, check the box for "Chooseadvanced customization of applications." Select Microsoft Office Tools andclick the + beside Microsoft Office Document Imaging. Make sure that Microsoft Office Document Image Writer is set to "Run from my computer." Then click Update.

Or you can use the Zan image writer at www.zan1011.com (30 day trial & maximum of 1000 pages per print trial)

Alex

If you have Chemstation...go to the print screen under data analysis and you can save the data directly to a .TIF data file and export it anywhere you want.

Thank you so much for these useful suggestions.

Giacomomo- I can see how to save a chromatogram directly from Chemstation as a .tif file, but then I cannot add any labels and titles as I can in Powerpoint.

Chemstation-the microsoft image writer works quite well, and I got much better results doing this than saving the Powerpoint file directly as a .tif file.

I got still better results with the Zan image writer-it seems quite flexible allowing you to save Powerpoint files in black and white or full colour. The .tif files you get are almost as good as the original Powerpoints, although I can still see some "steps" on the chromatographic peaks. This doesn't happen with our old way of loading the files into Illustrator and then saving as .tif, but it is so much more convenient the Zan way, and the file sizes much more manageable.

TIFFs are bitmaps, and Powerpoint is really bad at handling bitmaps because it's a vector graphics (graphic object) orientated system. It remembers that something is a line starting Here and ending There, rather than a row of pixels on a background of pixels.

Once you've pixelated something that was originally a set of lines, it becomes very hard to change. The process of converting a line graphic into pixels also forces you (or someone, somewhere) to choose the resolution, and if it's badly chosen, you are doomed to blocky pictures.

I've found that the best way to deal with chromatograms for publication is to export the raw data to any genuine graph plotting program as csv data (i.e. genuine numbers) and replot. This way the plotting program can stay in line-graphics-world without pixelating, and add all my annotations and get the axis labelling right. Once I'm happy, any decent graph plotting program will provide an ability to export in any number of different bitmap formats (tiff is sure to be there), and most importantly, at any resolution I choose.

Personally I use SigmaPlot, but there are many others.

Good luck!

lmh-thank you for this helpful information.

Thank you!