Problems with generating cpt palette files and ... odd problem after editing color palette files

Q&A
1

OSX 10.14.6
GMT Version = ? gmt --version gives me an error about a dylib not being loaded. Isuspect its really old though. The executables on my filesystem are from Nov 2012.

I’m having one relatively straightforward problem with generating cpt files.

When I enter::

makecpt -Cseis -T-600/600/50 >& seis.cpt …the output looks fine

but …makecpt -Cpanoply -T-600/600/50 results in:

makecpt: GMT Fatal Error: Z slice with dz = 0

The other problem is a little more mysterious and may no be a GMT problem.

Occasionally I might edit a cpt file to replace one color with another. For instance, I might replace the yellow that occupies the region around 0.0 in the above seis.cpt file with white. A simple replacement of 255 255 0 with 255 255 255. When I input that file to psscale and plot the results in the Apple preview application it looks fine. But when I open the postscript file in Adobe Illustrator I get black sections across the color scale. Is this a GMT problem or an Adobe Illustrator problem?

2

Your panoply issue usually means you have a file called panoply.cpt in your current directory so it reads that instead but the file is empty. E.g.:

touch panoply.cpt
gmt makecpt -Cpanoply -T-600/600/50
makecpt [ERROR]: CPT panoply.cpt has no z-slices!

As for the Illustrator question: Usually means a bug - they have bugs every other version of Illustrator. Maybe you can work around it by making a PDF first before opening in AI.