RE: [ncl-talk] NCL operationally

Dear Mary,

Sorry for the late response. Here are some answers to you comments and
questions...

> I sure hope we can get a good PNG driver out. I'm not sure why the
> experimental one is so slow. What were the times for it?

We've rerun the benchmark with the experimental PNG driver of NCL. It's
a bit hard to compare, as both MetView and NCL(eps->pstoimg) make
antialiased plots. We've tried to choose a size/resolution which would
result in more or less the same quality of image.

-------------------------------------------
        PS Plot Conversion to png Total
                      convert pstoimg
-------------------------------------------
MetView (46) 50
NCL 28 26 18 46
NCL(png) 128
-------------------------------------------

Especially the fonts render very badly in the NCL(png) version.

> From the NCL end, does it make a difference if you start with a "ps"
> rather than an "eps" file?

Yes, this didn't change the timings. This is to be expected, as output a
ps simply adds a few lines to the eps.

> Would it be possible for you to provide us with all the data files and
> scripts so we can look at things here? You can email me offline about
> this.

I will send you the test case offline.

> > - We will probably start introducing NCL operationally for
> the first few
> > plots quite soon... :-)
>
> Glad to hear that. :-)

We had some discussions concerning the operational use of NCL. In that
context it would be interesting to have some feedback on the following
points:
- What are the long term plans of NCAR for NCL?
- Are you aware of any other offices using NCL operationally?

> It should be there, as we include ctrans with all distributions of
> NCL. Did you build from source code? If so, perhaps ctrans didn't
> build successfully.

No, I simply downloaded the compile binaries for my platform. The ctrans
binary does not seem to be present in the bin/ directory. I will mail
you my machine specs offline.

Cheers,
Oli
Received on Mon Jan 26 2009 - 09:28:58 MST