Making Slides at the UBC Biomedical Imaging Facility

This costs money and it is not cheap! Be sure that you actually need the high-quality images and, if you are not paying for these out of your own pocket, that your advisor or whoever is paying for them has approved it.

Given all that, here are the steps involved:

• Produce the images.

  The film recorder has a resolution of either 2000 or 4000 lines. (I believe this is measured perpendicular to the direction of film travel -- i.e., the "x" direction. -- I should include a diagram to show this.) However, the recorder will scale any size of image up (or down) to fit, preserving aspect ratio and keeping the whole image in view. The optimal aspect ratio (x:y) is 2:3 to use the maximum slide area.

• Convert the images to Encapsulated PostScript files.

  Some software works for this, some doesn't. The option of "ghostview" to write individual pages does not work. "px2ps" on SGI machines does work. How other converters such as "imconv" and "pnmtops" work is not known.

  Allegedly, all your slides could be in one file, with PostScript "showpage" commands advancing the film, but to play it safe, put one image in each EPS file.

• Get the files to Biomed.

  Biomed hours are Mo-Fr 8:30am-5pm. Contact Karl at 2-5769 to set everything up. There are two ways to get files there:

  • Take 3.5" MS-DOS diskettes to Biomed.

    IBM RS/6000's (with "dosread", "doswrite", etc.) and some department SPARCs (with "mcopy", etc.) can read, write, format, and list MS-DOS-compatible 3.5" diskettes. Biomed can decompress "compress(1)"ed files, if you need to do that to fit your EPS files on the diskettes. Of course, you should use 1.44MB HD diskettes. (Steve or I usually have a few loaners lying around.)

  • ftp to Biomed.

    This is a new facility that I haven't used. Contact Karl for more information.

  There's a form you'll need to fill out. Turnaround is 2-3 working days, with near-overnight turnaround possible at a premium rate. You also get your choice of 2000- or 4000-line output, with 4000-line costing more. 2000-line For most of the stuff we do in Imager, you really need the 4000-line mode.