27 Apr
2014
27 Apr
'14
8:30 a.m.
I've been wondering, is there any kind of
application out there that
would let one create a Tek format image out of -- say -- a PNG (or
other similar bitmap), or from a vector format (like SVG)?
It appears my memory was faulty. (Quelle surprise!) I wasn't using
ghostscript, or at least not directly, though pstoedit appears to use it
internally. Here are the notes I wrote when I was playing with this.
==========
To convert a color image to Tektronix vector format:
djpeg scene.jpg | # jpeg to ppm
ppmtopgm | # ppm to pgm
pnmnlfilt 2 1 | # adaptive smoothing
pnmnorm | # contrast stretch
pgmtopbm -threshold \ # to bitmap, via threshold not dither
scene.pbm # output file
potrace -a 0.5 \ # corner threshold, smaller=sharper
-O 0.8 \ # curve optim tolerance, larger=flatter
-t 50 \ # "turd" filter min size of feature
-r 320x200 \ # output device resolution
-b pdf \ # output format
-o scene.pdf \ # output file
scene.pbm # input file
pstoedit -f plot-tek \ # output format
scene.pdf \ # input file
scene.tek # output file
==========
Obviously a lot of the settings, and the pbm manipulations, are either
specific to a given image, or need tuning to taste, etc.
De