NOTE: The difax mailing list is no longer active. The list archives are made available for historical reasons.
Thought I'd add a few things to my previous comments:
we are using a sparc printer and printing in two sizes, 11x17 (surface and
other select maps) and 8.5x14 (radars, min/max temp, etc) (two trays). Besides
the truncation of the bottom of the surface map, everything else seems to be
fine. I don't have any problem fitting the 4-panel maps on the 11x17 paper. The
DIFAX via the idd has been great, much better then the old satellite-okidata
method. Plus, we keep 3 weeks of maps on line and students (using xv) are able
to display the maps on their workstations, cut and paste, enlarge, print-out,
etc. It has greatly enhanced our synoptic class and the maps are much easier to
read than the old okidata printouts. I would never want to go back to the old
method.
-andrew devanas
associate in meteorology
florida state university
I'll just chime in a little here, also. We've been doing difax over IDD for about half a year now, and have had few problems, once we worked the kinks out. As previously stated, size of the images can be a problem. We solved most of those problems by using the pbmplus utilities to cut four panel images down into 4 different images (it's much better for viewing online, and quicker to load when my boss is teaching his forecasting classes). We also do cropping on some of the regular images, and crop down to the area that we're usually interested in. We also save the whole image each time, in case we need it for any reason. As previously noted, the images often need to be rotated 90 degrees, or have other things done to them, so I made up a little scheme were we have a configuration file for each difax product that we want to save. In the conf file, we are able to define the transformations that we want to do to each product. So, we can cut the images into panels, crop, rotate, and scale the images, all of which are easily done through the pnm routines. Whenever a difax product comes in over the IDD, it gets sent to a perl script I wrote, which does the stuff. It works well. Of course, there are occasional problems with getting the products over the IDD, but we haven't had too many problems. As for the the problem with g3topbm, does everybody use the -kludge option? When I've left it off in the past, things just don't work. Anyway, my scripts are far too messy for anyone else to read (they've sorta grown organically as our needs have changed here), but I'll attempt to answer any questions folks have... Dana dana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
difax archives: