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Re: [idvdevelopers] IDV Improvements in the Area of Publication Quality Graphics

The new labels will be very useful.

Tom's views on making high quality graphics are quite sensible and reflect my experience. Use the IDV to display the data, and use software designed to make high quality presentation graphics to make presentation graphics.
When demonstrating the IDV to new potential users, the striking IDV data 
displays are impressive, but in my experience, can be misleading.  Many 
people assume the IDV is just to make pretty pictures.  Then they wonder 
where the "publication quality" labels are.   I make a point that the 
real value in the IDV is data exploration.  You use the IDV as part of 
research, to discover results, not merely as a way to present results.
With complex, three-dimensional, time varying data, simply seeing what 
you have can be tricky.  The IDV lets you explore modern complex data 
with displays which are designed for such data.
The IDV also enables the highly-developed power of human vision and the 
brain to detect features in complex moving shapes.
Now I use this to describe the use of the IDV - The IDV is for 
exploration of complex three-dimensional data in geophysics. The IDV is 
designed to help you discover and understand complex details in your 
data, and to compare diverse data sets in fully-interactive 3D displays.
If you have Earth science data, the IDV is a powerful tool to 
investigate it.
In modern research there is sometimes a rush to collect data and then to 
present findings.  Careful examination of data can be rewarding.  As 
Louis Agassiz repeatedly told his students of natural history, first you 
must look at your fish.

> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Julien Chastang<chastang@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> IDV Developers,
>>
>> We have been making improvements in the area of publication quality graphics
>> that are summarized in the attached image.
>>

On 06/04/2012 07:35 PM, Tom Whittaker wrote:
p.s. I bumped into one of our scientists ... His
philosophy is that he might make a hundred pictures while doing his
research, but he needs to pick just 2 or 3 for publication, so he's
willing to take "the extra few minutes" to use a real graphics program
to produce just what he wants....which is not necessarily what "some
program" does.  Interesting perspective, eh?

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Julien Chastang<chastang@xxxxxxxx>  wrote:
IDV Developers,

We have been making improvements in the area of publication quality graphics
that are summarized in the attached image.



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