GCG: Preparing Sequence Data for Publication

Abstract

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.