ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > Working with files and reports > Saving reports and data > Saving track plots and heat maps

Saving track plots and heat maps

Overview

Although you can save an entire report which contains track plots or heat maps (see Saving documents), there may be occasions when all you actually want to save is one of the track plots or heat maps themselves. This is easily done - just right click over the relevant track plot (or heat map) and select Save plot... from the menu which appears. This will cause the Save plot window to be displayed, where you can specify a name and location for the file and choose the format it should be saved in.

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The 'Save plot' window

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Formats in which track plots and heat maps can be saved

The Save plot window

You will probably be familiar with the Save plot window already, as it's based on the standard 'save' window used in almost all Windows software.

It's often very useful to enlarge this window so you can see more files. You can do this by dragging the bottom right corner with the mouse.

Figure 1. The Save plot window.

Files list

The files list shows the folders and files of the selected type (see Save as type, below) stored in the current location. You can double click a folder to open it, or you can click a file to transfer its name to the File name field.

File name

Use this field to enter a name for the file. You can enter up 255 characters, but your entry can't contain any of the following characters: \ / : * ? " < > |.

Save as type

You can save track plots and heat maps in a number of different formats, and you should choose the one you wish to use from the list displayed here. The formats themselves are described in detail below.

Formats in which track plots and heat maps can be saved

Portable Network Graphics format

Portable Network Graphics format (or PNG format) is a raster graphics format that supports lossless compression - this creates small files without affecting image quality. It is our recommended format for saving track plots and heat maps.

Windows bitmap format

Windows bitmap format (also known as BMP format) is supported by just about every Windows program, but files tend to be quite large.

Graphics interchange format

Graphics interchange format (also known as GIF format) is also widely supported. GIF has one big disadvantage, it only supports a maximum of 256 different colours; this can cause the colours in the saved image to be different to the original.

JPEG format

JPEG format is another widely supported format. JPEG images are compressed, but the technique used is really designed to work well with photographs - graphics images (such as track plots) tend to look a little blurred.

Tagged Image File format

Tagged Image File format (also known as TIFF or TIF format) is widely used in the publishing and graphic design industries and was designed to allow images to be shared across different operating systems (e.g. Windows and Macs). It is the format favoured by some journals.

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