Terry has clarified what I want. In the past, we have used Canvas to prepare figures for publication. They are usually mixed bitmaps and vector graphics on a letter sized page format. Thus a pure painting program will not work. We take images from our microscope in a bitmap tiff format and use a drawing program to lay out multiple images, then add labels like arrows, scale bars, descriptive text etc. Then the whole thing is saved as a tiff or jpeg at 300 dpi and sent to the journal for publication (hopefully). On the Mac, Canvas was always our first choice for this, and then Deneba decided to stop supporting the Mac version of their software. Corel got out of hte business years ago, so there are really no good commercial drawing/ painting programs left for the Mac. You can do it with Photoshop, but it is much easier to use a vector drawing program that can handle images than a painting program that can add objects. Also, that program is a confusing mess to teach to new students in the lab. That is why I am turning to open source to see if I can get the job done that way. The reason I asked for resolution, is that the images we use are often much larger (at 72 dpi) than we need so you have to rescale them to the 4" column size of the journal and it is often easier to specify a resolution to resize all images to the same size than to drag the corners to resize. Also, it clarifies that you are actually increasing the resolution rather than down sampling (as Powerpoint often seems to do). How would I ask the developers to add a box in Object Properties that reads out the resolution of a bitmapped image? It would be very useful for people like me. Dave
On Oct 10, 2009, at 9:59 PM, Terry Brown wrote:
On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:16:13 -0400 David Knecht ATT <david.knecht@...2671...> wrote:
I am new to Inkscape and trying it out as a way of labeling images for publication. First, is there a way to search the archives for answers? Second, is there a way to get Inkscape to display the resolution of an image in dpi or ppi? Also, where do you adjust the ruler settings?
Inkscape can be a good choice for adding labels on top of images, particularly if you're going to export the image in a format which combines bitmap and vector, like .pdf or .eps. I'm assuming you want to add labels / scale bars / arrows pointing to features on top of a photograph.
If you're publishing say a 300x300 pixel crop from micrograph of something, and it's going to be printed about 3 inches across on a 2400 dpi output device (i.e. a journal), creating a .pdf or .eps this way gives you nice sharp edges on the labels you add on top of the image, even though the image itself is going to be a little coarse.
You don't really need to worry about resolution until you export the image, the export image dialog shows you both the size in pixels and the dpi of the export you're creating. As long as the export is as large or slightly larger, pixel wise, than the photograph you're labeling, you won't be losing resolution, but there will probably be some resampling of the image, so it won't be pixel identical with the input photo.
I think the ruler uses the "default units" setting from the document settings dialog (far right of the top tool bar). If you want to make the change permanent you need to edit and save the default template in the templates directory, e.g. /usr/share/inkscape/templates. Seems there should be a user local path for this, but I don't know it.
Cheers -Terry
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Dr. David Knecht Department of Molecular and Cell Biology Co-head Flow Cytometry and Confocal Microscopy Facility U-3125 91 N. Eagleville Rd. University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269 860-486-2200 860-486-4331 (fax)