By Pontus Lurcock (pont -at- talvi -dot- net), 2009.
Warning: this is not a polished, general-purpose utility. It's a one-off program written for a specific task. I'm releasing it in the hope that parts of the code may be useful or informative for other developers.
For my PhD dissertation [1], I needed to produce a graphical sediment log of a 25-metre section, integrating various sedimentological and magnetic observations into a single stratigraphic column. I wrote a script in Python to do this. The script reads data from external text files and from hard-coded structures within the code itself and uses Cairo (via the cairocffi bindings) to produce a PDF from them.
As it stands, this is a one-shot single-purpose program rather than a
generally useful utility: the data for my specific section is not well
separated from the general-purpose plotting code, and there are a few
ad-hoc tweaks to improve the appearance of these particular data. The
code is sparsely commented and documented only by this README, but is
relatively clean and comprehensible. It may provide some useful
examples or fragments for anyone trying to achieve something similar. In
particular, the file symb.py contains Cairo implementations of a few
sedimentological pattern fills, which would be easy to reuse elsewhere.
For convenience, the generated output PDF files are included in the repository.
[1] http://hdl.handle.net/10523/2281
First, ensure that the Nimbus Sans L Regular Condensed font is
installed. This font is provided in this repository in the file
NimbusSanL-ReguCond.ttf. On Ubuntu Linux, it can be installed by
copying the file to the .fonts subdirectory in the home directory,
and running fc-cache. If the font is not installed correctly,
Cairo will fall back to a default font, which may cause problems
with text positioning and alignment.
The program requires cairocffi, a set of Python bindings for the Cairo
library. On Ubuntu, these can be installed via the package
python3-cairocffi (which will also install the cairo library itself as
a dependency if required).
Run the make-log.py script to generate a set of sediment log PDFs in
the output directory.
The original program used a customized version of Jos Buivenga's font Delicious. The font's license terms don't allow me to redistribute it, so for this release I have replaced it with Nimbus Sans L Condensed, which is included in this repository for convenience. I have also updated the program to use Python 3 rather than the original Python 2, and to use cairocffi rather than Pycairo, because the latter has problems with vector pattern fills.
The ‘ffq’ in ‘sedlog-ffq’ is an abbreviation for ‘Fairfield Quarry’, the location of the logged section.
The code is released under the MIT license (see comments in Python source files for exact license terms). The Nimbus Sans L Regular Condensed font is redistributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (full text at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html )