Export Graph Dialog
This dialog is activated by selecting the Export Graph command from the File Menu. The command appears in the file menu whenever a graph window is selected.
The file Name as well as the Path where the image will be saved can be chosen by pressing the file system browsing buttons at the right. They can also be edited manually. Please note that QtiPlot provides an auto-completion mechanism when editing the file path.
All graphs, or one graph at a time, can be exported in any of the available image formats. Depending upon the image format chosen, you may be able to customize various image file parameters as well as the size of the exported image.
For the .bmp, .pbm, .jpeg, .xbm, .pgm, .ppm image formats, the only available option is the quality of the image. This parameter defines the image compression ratio, and may be set to any value between 1 and 100%. Higher values produce a better quality image and a larger file, while lower values result in increasingly lossy compression, degraded image quality, and smaller file size. For .png, .tiff and .xpm, there is an option to choose a transparent background.
For .eps, .pdf and .ps file formats, the option dialog is different, see screenshot bellow. If the option Export as embedded image is checked, the output file is only a wrapper around a raster image of the 2D plot layer/window. For a real vectorial output this option should be unchecked.
In the case of a vectorial output, the Native fonts option becomes available. If checked, the text strings that contain only characters from the Code Page 1252 Windows Latin 1 (ANSI) will be exported as text objects, all other text strings being converted to paths and exported as drawing objects. The number of native text fonts is limited to the standard fonts provided by the PostScript and PDF formats (Times, Helvetica and Courier with their bold and/or oblique/italic variants). If the Native fonts option is unchecked all text strings will be converted to drawing paths.
By default the plot is exported to its real size on screen, but if you wish, you can choose a different size by checking the Custom print size box. In addition, there is a Keep aspect ratio option. If you check this box and modify one dimension of a plot, the other dimension will automatically be modified to keep the plot's aspect ratio the same.
The Scale Factor control can be used in order to customize the width of the exported lines, the size of the plot symbols, the length of axes ticks, the spacing between axes and tick labels, etc... If set to zero, this control displays the text Automatic and QtiPlot calculates a scaling factor based on the proportion between the custom export size and the actual size of the 2D plot. If set to one, all plot elements enumerated above keep their user defined values when exported. The same considerations are valid for the Scale Fonts Factor option, which can be used in order to fine tune the size of the exported fonts.
When exporting multi-layer 2D plot windows the option Clip space around layers is also available. If this option is checked QtiPlot uses the bounding rectangle of the layers to calculate the size of the exported image. Otherwise the size of the image is equal to the interior size of the graph window (the frame and the title bar of the window being excluded).
When exporting the plot to LaTeX (.tex) there are two very useful options: Export font sizes and Escape special characters in texts. If checked, the first option will include LaTeX commands in the output which keep the original font sizes. If not checked, the font size specified in the preamble of the TeX document will be used for all text strings in the plot. The second option specifies whether LaTeX special characters ($ _ { } ^ % #) should be escaped or not when exporting. If the title or the axis labels contain LaTeX syntax (like superscripts, subscripts, etc...), and you want them to be interpreted by the LaTeX compiler, you must uncheck this option.
When exporting 3D plot windows to a vectorial image format (.eps, .pdf, .ps, .pgf or .svg) the option Export 3D texts as becomes available, allowing to choose the output method for texts. If this option is set to Bitmap images all text strings will be exported as raster images embedded in the output file. If you choose the Native fonts method the number of available text fonts is limited to the standard fonts provided by the PostScript and PDF formats (Times, Helvetica and Courier with their bold and/or oblique/italic variants). If the LaTeX file method is used, the texts are not be included in the output file, instead QtiPlot generates an extra .tex file, having the same base name and containing all the text strings from the 3D plot window, with their exact positions, colors and font sizes. By compiling this .tex file using a locally installed LaTeX compiler it is possible to get a vectorial output image that includes your custom fonts. If the path to the local LaTeX compiler is correctly specified via the File Locations tab of the Preferences dialog and you choose to export a 3D plot to .pdf using the LaTeX file method for the export of text strings, QtiPlot will automatically launch a compilation process using the pdflatex executable that is normally located in the same folder as the latex compiler. The .tex file containing the text strings is automatically deleted by QtiPlot at the end of the compilation process.
It is also possible to export animated 3D plot windows to .avi movie files. In this case there are three options available: the total number of Frames, the Frame Rate (which is the number of frames per second) and the Image quality. Internally QtiPlot exports each animation frame as a JPG image.
