On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 03:32 AM, Martin Kuemmel wrote:

I am working since a month now with python, and I have to say that I am impressed about its capabilities. Now I encountered a problem, and hope there will be a solution in scientific python. I have to make plots in a noninteractive way, and I have to store them in a html-compatible format like gif, or jpeg, or png or whatsever. The help of the plotting package says that plots can be saved, but the format is not specified. So, is the a way to get gif's, jpg'or similar??

I haven't worked with scipy's gnuplot module for some time, and have not yet switched to employ chaco for major work, but since no one else has responded yet, maybe I can help you out. There are a number of different interfaces to use gnuplot from python, and gnuplot, as you might know, has numerous drivers to plot to at least 20 output formats. I am currently using the python's Gnuplot module, which is independent of scipy. That supports basically output to various terminal drivers (x11 etc.) and output to postscript with the "hardcopy" function. Unfortunately I am not aware of an easy way to directly hardcopy to other formats. But I think scipy's gplt package might do this, if you check out the plotting documentation on the scipy site (as I said, I haven't used this in a while). Another way would be to first create postscript output from Gnuplot or gplt and then convert it externally, e.g. with the Imagemagick package, which is readily scriptable and available for most Unix systems, just do "convert plot.ps plot.png". This actually has the advantage of getting the much superior layout that gnuplot provides with the postscript driver compared to other output formats, e.g. Greek letters and other symbols, better axis labelling etc. HTH, Derek