Transferring DPlot plots to other applications

Copy a metafile and/or bitmap to the Clipboard.

Select the Copy Picture command (or press CTRL+C) to copy a metafile and/or a bitmap image to the Clipboard. In the target application, select the Paste command (generally on the Edit menu) or Paste Special to choose among the available image formats.

A metafile preserves all of the information content of a plot and is much easier to edit than a bitmap. A metafile is device-independent, so the resolution of the image will be that of the final destination output device. DPlot produces both a standard metafile and an enhanced metafile. If the target application supports it, an enhanced metafile is generally preferable. However, DPlot will not produce either type of metafile for 3D views of 3D or 4D plots or for 2D views of surface plots that use shaded color bands. For those plot types a bitmap will be the only available format.

For problems with importing metafiles into another application, particularly into Microsoft Office products, please see the Known Problems section.

Note that a much more limited number of applications can support metafiles than bitmaps, and in some cases the metafile will be automatically converted to a bitmap.

The Copy command also creates a bitmap image and transfers that image to the Clipboard. The bitmap image created by the Copy command uses the dimensions specified by the Copy Dimensions command. Bitmaps are supported by a wide variety of applications. Bitmap images do not generally scale well relative to metafiles.

Save an image to a disk file.

Many graphic applications and word processors will allow you to import a picture file from disk. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can insert an image in a document by selecting Insert>Picture>From file. DPlot can export:

File extension	Description
WMF	Standard Windows Metafile
EMF	Enhanced Metafile The same restrictions mentioned above apply to WMF and EMF files: DPlot will not produce metafiles for 3D views of 3D or 4D data or for 2D views of surface plots that use shaded color bands.
BMP	Windows Bitmap Choose from 8- or 24-bit color depth, and optionally choose run-length encoding for 8-bit files. Though RLE-encoding of bitmaps is not often used, it is supported by most popular graphics applications and results in a significantly smaller file for typical DPlot graphs.
GIF	Graphics Interchange Format The image will be limited to 256 colors. For XY plots this is generally not a limitation, but may result in loss of detail in 3D images with many colors.
JPG	JPEG Picture DPlot automatically selects "good" quality, which is about the minimum acceptable quality that doesn't produce too many unsightly artifacts. For a better quality plot in a usually smaller file, PNG is recommended.
PNG	Portable Network Graphics Unlike JPEG, PNG compression is lossless. And unlike GIF, 24- or 32-bit images can be saved. Compression of DPlot plots is generally superior to the poorest quality JPEG files and is comparable to GIF. However, PNG is not as widely supported as any of the other bitmap formats.
TIF	Tagged Image File Format DPlot will always use LZW compression. Files saved with this plugin will generally be larger than the corresponding PNG image.

To save any of these formats, select the Save As command on the File menu, then select the desired format in the Save As Type box. For the bitmap formats you will then be prompted for a width and height (in pixels) of the image. To use the same dimensions as the graph you see on your display, enter 0 for either the width or the height.

Page url: http://www.dplot.com/help/index.htm?helpid_exportdplot.htm