Coyote's Guide to Traditional IDL Graphics

Marketing campaigns have as their sole objective to convince you that life would be complete if only you had that shiny new gadget. But, what if it wasn't true? What if you had everything you need right here, right now?

We have seen five new graphics systems come and go in the past 10 years. Each was going to revolutionize the way you did graphics programming in IDL. But which graphics system is used by 90% of IDL users? You guessed it: the "old" graphics system, with its Plot, Contour, and Surface commands. Why? Because these traditional commands are fast, flexible, and firmly established in the minds and code of IDL programmers the world over.

All these traditional graphics commands need is to be refurbished to work correctly in a modern computer environment. This book describes exactly how to do that, using programs from the powerful Coyote Library. The techniques described in this book work in any version of IDL, including the one you are using today.

Whether you are a beginning IDL programmer, or a veteran of many years experience, you will find something new, interesting, and thought-provoking in the pages of this book. You will learn:

• How to write IDL programs that work identically on every graphics device.
• How to get your money's worth from your 24-bit graphics card and write color independent programs.
• How to produce high quality PostScript and raster files automatically from the same programs that display graphics on your computer.
• How to display graphics in resizeable graphics windows.
• How to save and restore graphic visualizations and/or pass them on to your colleagues.
• How the Coyote Graphics System works and how your programs can take advantage its power.

After reading this book, you will not only write graphics programs that duplicate the functionality of the latest of the new graphics systems, but you will write programs that are faster (orders of magnitude faster, in some cases!) and simpler. Plus, you will be able to create new displays of graphical information that are simply not possible in the new graphics systems. This is the book that I wish was written for me when I was starting to write IDL programs. This is the book that will change the way you write IDL programs forever!