re: colour lines in a graph

[RichardJones]

Hello

I know this is a long shot but im desperate!! :confused:

Last year I did some graphs for a project. They were simple line graphs. Each graph had four lines on each with a different colour to distinguish them.
The paper is being reused and all graphs have to be in black and white. I can conver the graphs to b+w in photoshop easily. However they are not too clear. I thought I could manually change the line to be dotted, dashed etc to distinguish them. However it took me an hour to do one graph. Has anyone got any ideas how I could do this quicker or if there is a prog out there that does it :rolleyes:

I know this is a long shot but I just dont wanna spend hours sitting in front of paint messing around with individual pixels

Cheers for any help
Rich :p

[twistedcranium]

What graphics file format is the original graph in?

What graphics editing programs do you have access to?

[enat66]

Which graph creating program are you using if any at all. I sugest excel or the free Open Office.
Get it
here (http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.3/index.html)

You run ther Calc program after installing the office suite...insert your data in the cells...highlight and click the graph button. Then follow the wizard and creat your graph. Then you can manually select each colored bar, right-click, Choose "Object Properties", you can choose different colors that would print different on a black and white printer or choose hatching that makes the bars easy to tell apart.

[RichardJones]

Hi

Thanks for the replies. The graphs I have are bitmaps. I did them in Matlab last year and just copied them out of that and into a word document. Now however I cant find the data I used to create them and just have the bitmaps.


Thanks for the info on OpenOfffice enat66. Ive heard about this and might download it.

Richard

[twistedcranium]

My suggestion would be to open the bitmap in your favorite graphics program...Paint Shop Pro, PhotoPaint, The GIMP etc. ....and then keep that bitmap as the base (or background) layer. Then create a few layers on top of the background and trace over the background with objects (like a dotted line) or vector art. Once you're done tracing, delete the background, merge the image into one layer from the many, and you're set.

It is a painful way to recreate the image, but it works! There are soooo many graphics packages out there....for windows and linux alike, and some are free (i.e. The GIMP and a limited version of PaintShop Pro).

I know of expensive CAD software out there that converts raster graphics into vector graphics interactively, but I doubt you want to spend thousands of dollars on this project.