GCG: Preparing Sequence Data for Publication

With the advent of personal computers and graphical user interfaces, the justification for publishing programs on terminal- or textdriven devices is to be questioned. However, biological sequence data frequently are not just “text” that can be tailored with a word processor program. This chapter, therefore, deals with text formatting of single sequences (Method 1 ) and multiple-sequences (Method 2 ). The output of these two procedures can still be used on another program to produce slides; however, is also suited for direct publication. Within the GCG program package, there are furthermore two programs that are excluded here. One is red , a VAXIVKS-derived RUNOFF-like formatter. This program is not available on the UNIX version, The other program is figure . Any GCG program that produces graphics can be used with the command line option figure to produce a the metafile. This file contains all the information needed to produce graphics and thus, can be manipulated to fine-tune the final layout. Except for some special cases (e.g., painting plasmidmaps as described in Chapter 4 ),figure is not really a state-of-the art tool for biologists to create graphics from scratch.