Bug: a88/003

Anonymous reviewer writes:
‘The authors point out that this program is capable of producing
publication-quality figures with little fuss. I would say this is marginally
true, especially for the PCA "blue line" fit on the Z-plots. While this is
interesting and useful during the analysis process (and could be useful as an
element in a published figure)- I would wish to decrease the length of the
line and clean-up the various plots. I attempted to do this using both the
PDF and the SVG files, using Illustrator (CS 5.5). The SVG file did not work
well at all. The PDF opened in Illustrator- put the manner in which the
graphical elements were defined and grouped- with a multitude of clipping
masks- made editing and cleaning up the figure very difficult- more difficult
than similar plots produced by the other software packages we use. Making
specific recommendations to make these figures more useful is beyond my
ability- so I am sorry for just pointing out a problem without having a
specific recommendation for its solution.’

A bit tricky, this one. In particular, ‘The SVG file did not work well
at all’ is too vague to be dealt with very specifically, especially
since I don't have access to Illustrator CS 5.5. Possibly the best
I can do on this is to add another SVG export option, using the 
FreeHEP libraries, and hope that this one works better. It might be
as well to have the two options anyway, since you never know what
people will want to do with the SVGs, and two export libraries increases
the chance of compatibility with whatever the files are being 
fettled with.

Similar comments go for the PDF export. The criticism is a little more
specific here, but since PDF export is handled by a third-party library
I can't directly do much about it. Again, adding another option to
export via FreeHEP might be the best I can do -- and better documentation
of course.

I will also test the exported files with as many vector editors as
I can get my hands on, to see if I can replicate the problems which
Illustrator seems to have. Very hard to fix reliably without contact
with the user, though.

Finally, this makes me wonder if it would be feasible to incorporate
‘native’ SVG/PDF export into PuffinPlot -- possibly not as insane
as it sounds -- I will open a new ticket for it.

‘Native vector graphics export’ added as issue #227.

I think I have done as much as practically feasible on this one:
options for changing the length of the PCA lines or hiding them 
entirely; export options using FreeHEP as well as Batik; and a more
thorough discussion of vector export in the manual.