Useful computer tools
This page is a collection of computer tools that I found helpful during my stay at the University of Basel.
Color maps
Continuous color maps
To find a color map for scientific visualization that is aesthetic in color print, black-and-white safe, and does not introduce artifacts is a non-trivial task. Fortunately, this question has already been addressed, for instance in the following publications:
- Kenneth Moreland, Why We Use Bad Color Maps and What You Can Do About It.
Proceedings of Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI) (2016). DOI 10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2016.16.HVEI-133,
www.kennethmoreland.com/color-advice/. - Kenneth Moreland, Diverging Color Maps for Scientific Visualization.
Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing (2009). DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-10520-3_9,
www.kennethmoreland.com/color-maps/. - Peter Kovesi, Good Colour Maps: How to Design Them.
arXiv:1509.03700.
peterkovesi.com/projects/colourmaps/.
On his websites, Kenneth Moreland provides his articles, supplemental material, and links to related websites. Most importantly, you can download a collection of different color maps that can easily be imported in scientific plotting programs like gnuplot.
Discrete color maps
If you are just searching for a collection of different colors that fit nicely to one another, e.g. in order to color different graphs in a 2D plot, you may have a look at:
- A collection of gnuplot palettes available on github. There you will also find a picture that gives you a quick overview over the different palettes.
- A nice tool to identify and export colors: colorbrewer.
- The Adobe color wheel: color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel.
A LaTeX beamer template
Unfortunately, the University of Basel does not provide templates for presentations and posters in LaTeX format.This .zip archive contains my personal LaTeX presentation template that can be configured according to your needs. This introductory sample presentation gives you a glimpse on the possibilities of the template.
The template mimicks the corporate design of PowerPoint presentations of the University of Basel. The main colors of the corporate design are already predefined. For legal reasons, I did not include the University logo. However, you can download it here if you are a member of the University.
A LaTeX poster template
Unfortunately, the University of Basel does not provide templates for presentations and posters in LaTeX format. This .zip archive contains my personal LaTeX poster template that can be configured in many ways according to your needs. This introductory sample poster gives you a glimpse on the possibilities of the template. Except for minor adjustments, the template is mainly based on the baposter package by Brian Amberg and Reinhold Kalkhofer.
The main colors of the corporate design of the University of Basel are already predefined in the template. For legal reasons, I did not include the University logo, which however can be downloaded here if you are a member of the University.
If you are a member of NCCR QSIT, you may also use this package to create posters in the QSIT corporate design, since the QSIT background is already predefined. Again, the QSIT logo is not included.
PDF to X3 conversion for linux
Scientific posters can be printed at the IT services. They accept only PDF files that satisfy the PDF-X3 standard in order to ensure a successful printing process. However, if you use a presentation application or TeX to create your poster, these programs may not be able to export a PDF-X3 file directly.
A possible way to generate PDF-X3 files is to use commercial applications that allow you to save a PDF directly to the required format. Another way for linux users is to use a combination of ghostscript and pdftk to convert a PDF file to PDF-X3.
The following .zip archive contains a shell script that performs all the necessary steps for you. Except for minor changes and a bugfix, it is mostly based on a script written by A. Lode. To use it, unpack the .tar archive and install the packages ghostscript and pdftk using the package manager of your linux distribution. Type ./poster_convert.sh Name_of_the_poster.pdf and wait until a file Ready_to_print_X3_Name_of_the_poster.pdf has been generated.
Technical notes:
- The IT services accept only files produced by ghostscript 9.10 (that's why there is a warning if you have other versions), but ghostscript versions 9.18 and 9.25 should also work.
- The script first removes some bugs in PDF files created by Apple applications, converts the PDF to X3 standard using ghostscript, and finally sets the creator/producer information in the PDF metadata to ghostscript 9.10 (irrespective of which ghostscript version you actually used) to ensure that the PDF file is accepted by the IT services.