Tiago Pereira wrote: > Hi, > > I have a recurrent problem when trying to put some plots in pdf format. > Searching in this mailing list and google I haven't been able to find a > reasonable answer to this problem, and was wondering if someone could > point me in the right direction. > > The problem is the following. When saving to pdf matplotlib saves as a > vectorial pdf -- which is great. However I have some scatter plots that > have a lot of points (~ 400.000, see attached example in png). When I > save this into pdf the file is massive and takes a lot of time to open > in a reader. Since I don't really need the vectorial data for this > scatter plot, I was wondering if there was a way to still save as pdf > but keep the plot itself as a raster, instead of the full data. Why save > as pdf? Because I'd still like to have the scalable fonts. This is for a > publication, so it's much more harmonious to have the latex bits in the > plot as pdf. > > I have developed an intermediate solution. I have done a high-resolution > 2D histogram of the data and using imshow and a suitable colormap, > plotted that. For example in the blue points in the example I can get a > very good match on the screen. However I can only plot one set of data. > If I want to use other data in a different colour this doesn't work, > since another imshow will cover the original data. Unless there is the > option to have a transparent colour in the colormap, which I doubt. > > Do you have any ideas on how I could rasterize a plot and still save it > as pdf?
What you need is mixed-mode rendering, which mpl has, but without an API... http://www.mail-archive.com/matplotlib-de...@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02659.html http://www.mail-archive.com/matplotlib-de...@lists.sourceforge.net/msg04689.html There is at least one other recent reference to this, but I haven't found it. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
