Hi,
Sorry for coming in late in this conversation.
I won't disagree that Origin or Igor Pro can be used to make lovely
publication-quality graphics -- those are fine choices.
The poor quality of the graphics in the older versions of Ifeffit /
Horae was always been a disappointment to me. It's certainly
reasonable to say that exporting to another program is necessary, but
I believe the latest versions should and do have much higher quality
graphics. Larch certainly has much better graphics than Ifeffit.
See for example:
http://xraypy.github.com/xraylarch/xafs/xafsft.html#examples-forward-xafs-fourier-transforms
In the on-line docs, the graphics may look mediocre because they are
scaled, but if you click on them you will see the PNG file created
directly by saving the image from the Plot window (or cut with Ctrl-C
and pasted directly into presentation software). Another example
(from the feffit chapter):
http://xraypy.github.com/xraylarch/_images/feffit_feo_r.png
shows the Greek characters and mathematical rendering, generated using
latex notation. Depending on what you need, these may publication
quality graphs,and they can be copied directly from the Plotting
windows into other applications (for example, Ctrl-C to copy to
clipboard works). The axis labels (plain text or latex), colors,
symbols, line widths, and so on can be adjusted from a Plot
Configuration window after the plot is drawn, see
http://xraypy.github.com/xraylarch/plotting/index.html#interactive-use-of-the-plot-windows
There are many things that cannot be done simply with these plots
(figure-in-figure, complex stacking), but in principle, Larch can be
used to generate any of the kinds of plots available from the
matplotlib library, see
http://matplotlib.org/gallery.html
Of course, this does requires some scripting to make plots. There
are other good, free choices for making high-quality graphics. As
others have said, investing some time in learning how to make high
quality graphics is worth the effort. Origin or Igor Pro are very
good tools, and would be fine choices for learning and not very
expensive.
But please do not use Excel. It cannot make publication quality graphics.
Cheers,
--Matt
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