Making a Hardcopy

PLT makes a hardcopy by using the same PGPLOT routines but routed to a different graphics device. Thus the command does not make a hardcopy of what is currently on your screen, but rather, what would be plotted if you reissued the Plot command. The HArd ? command will display the name of your current default hardcopy device. It is possible to override this default when you enter the HArd command, thus HArd /VPS would make a vertical (portrait) mode Postscript file no matter what the default is. If you would like a different default than what is set up on your system, then you should define the logical name or on UNIX, the environment variable, PLT_HARDCOPY to contain the default you want. Let's assume the default is OK. So, merely enter

PLT> CSize 1.3   ! To increase the character size a bit
PLT> FOnt Roman  ! To use the nice looking Roman font
PLT> HArdcopy    ! To make a hardcopy file

The default PLT font is the Simple font because it plots the fastest. When you are making a hardcopy, speed is less important than quality. Therefore, you are encouraged to use the Roman font, which will give a more professional look to your hardcopy. As most journals greatly reduce the size of figures before printing, you should increase the character size. In the above example, CSize 1.3 makes the character size a factor of 1.3 times larger than the default. The default line width is one, which is the thinest possible line. On some laser printers, this is too thin, and therefore, you should increase the line width, using the LWidth command. Using LWidth 7 is not unreasonable for publication quality on some printers. In general the default hardcopy plot will fill the page on which it is being plotted. If a viewgraph was make of a full page plot, the projected size would overfill most screens. Therefore, it is useful to decrease the default size of the plot a bit. This can be done with the Viewport command. The default viewport is .1 .1 which means the box containing the graph extends from 0.10 to 0.90 of the total physical plotting area. To make a plot half the size, use View .3 .3. View .2 .2 will result in good size for most viewgraphs.