You might find Dagra useful for digitizing graphs on Windows. It uses Bezier curves, so you can trace quite complicated data without having to click on every point. Very fast. There is a trial available here: http://www.blueleafsoftware.com/Products/Dagra/

Paul.

Gentlemen: Hope you can help. I need a freeware which will

scan & digitize a bmp or jpg spectral profile and give me (export)a .dat file. I tried Peak Explorer but discovered its the wrong software - only works with.dat numeric input. I tried Windig many times but cannot get it to work - its very cumbersome and instructions I cannot follow. Is there anything simple with good instructions you can recommend.

I need this because most spectral libraries provide bmp profiles only so I need to take the profile and convert to .dat which my processing software Vspec will open and give an image of. Any help greatly appreciated.

Jerry

Biswajit,

Since you use matlab to plot the digitized data, you may like to use a digitizer written in matlab. I wrote a simple digitizer in matlab some time ago. It is not as sophisticated as Engauge, but gets the job done. Do take a look (link ) and see if it is useful.

Arun

Thanks for the tips. I'll try them out. Please post other tips and time-saving techniques that you might know of (for figures).

Rant: It drives me crazy when I see raster images in papers when vector images are just as easy to create. The quality of figures in journal papers seems to have deteriorated since the late 1980s. In the past there were expert draftsmen who drew figures. They spent quite a bit of time drawing plots and other figures. Now that most such draftsmen have lost their jobs, the final versions of figures are made by the authors of a paper. The result is often amateurish and in some cases undecipherable (see for example the Proceedings of the APS Shock Compression Conferences). Three of the last five papers that I have reviewed had figures that were illegible when printed in black and white. We need to bring back the professionals :)

Thanks for the tips. I like Matlab too, but GNU Octave is free. Or for making plots, my favorite is Gnuplot. Linux users probably have both and Windows users can get both free as part of the cygwin package.

-Mark

Dear Biswajit,

If you have LaTeX installed (which, I am certain you do), the following command also works for concatenating pdf files:

texexec –pdfarrange –result out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf …

Here is some more information on manipulating pdf files (in GNU/Linux OS).

Biswajit,

For windows users, there is a free software called WINDIG which can be used to digitize plots. I use ubuntu and it comes with a digitizing software called g3data.

V. Hegadekatte, University of Karlsruhe, Germany