At 11:56 PM -0500 1/9/01, J.Paul Robinson wrote: >OK I give in....where are you Mario....surely the MAC software is >the publishers dream....it can't be as horrific as all these messages >suggest....(although I did note its really interesting changing the >axis label in cellquest...) did I miss something ... Paul (etc.): Unfortunately, CellQuest was never written with the generation of publication quality figures in mind. Hence, all of its displays (as far as I can tell) are "bitmap" representations, with no vector/font information. Hence, it is difficult to change things like colors, fonts, etc.--you must use a program that can do bitmap editting and then overlay with your own text/line information. (Witness the contortions people have to go through to make publication-quality graphics!) Paul was baiting my response about FlowJo and Macintoshes, so here goes. FlowJo was indeed designed to do publication quality output (although not necessarily directly from the program, albeit it is possible). Not only do you have great control over the images (font usage, font styling, overlay colors, addition of graphical elements, text elements, annotations, etc.), but all images can be exported in either JPEG, GIF, TIFF, or PICT format. The first three formats, while useful for sending to PC's and publishing on the web, are essentially bitmap representations (although high-resolution, publication-quality). However, the PICT format, which is the Macintosh standard for graphics, gives you complete control. When you copy from FlowJo and paste into any graphics application, you can then ungroup the elements, select individual lines (or contours, dots in dot plots, etc.), text items, or whatever, and manipulate them at will. For some examples, see <http://www.treestar.com/flowjo/v3/html/pubgallery.html>. For other examples, see any of my publications... in particular, I'd like to take this opportunity to advertise the upcoming February issue of Nature Medicine, in which we have a New Technology article about 11-color flow cytometry! The nice thing about Macintoshes is (as Paul notes) their power in publication. You can easily copy and paste between nearly any applications, and, if they follow the PICT format, in a way that preserves grouping of objects, fonts, vectors, fill patterns, bitmap images, etc. etc. By the way, I second the suggestion previously made on this list regarding "GraphicConverter". This is an oustanding program that you can use to interconvert between nearly any graphics formats. It is shareware, written by Thorsten Lemke in Germany. See <http://www.lemkesoft.com/> for information. mr
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