Chromatography Plot

Dejan Pljevljakusic
Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Overview

This application is the result of observed discrepancies in the image exporting resolution, from chromatography analytical devices, and the high quality image requirements in scientific journals. The most common exporting resolution from devices is 72 dpi, while journal requirements for black-white images are in the range of 300 - 1200 dpi. This application imports time and signal values from .csv dataset and produce downloadable plot in desired resolution range.

Preparing dataset

Each analytical device should have some kind of textual export system. For example, for Agilent's Data Analysis software the exporting path would be File/Export File/CSV File…

In the next dialog you should select signal radio button and check Write to Clipboard check-box.

Then paste data into new Notepad page, just to clean-up any unwanted formatting, select all and copy again.

Last step would be pasting data into Excel…

… and saving document as Comma-separated-value (.csv).

Instructions

Application URL can be found here and it looks like image shown below.

Upload csv. file and wait for plotting result. Adjust x and y axes according to your Retention time and Signal abundance (sliders). Through input fields, adjust desired resolution, ordinate caption and image dimensions.

NOTE: If chosen resolution is 300 dpi, image dimensions should be about 4000x2000 px, twice larger resolution of 600 dpi requires about twice larger image dimensions (8000x4000 px), and so on.

Furthermore, upload limit for .csv file is 10 Mb.

When you are fully satisfied with plot look, click Download plot button and save your tiff image.

Final result of your 300 dpi chromatograpy plot should look like this

Example datasets and source code are available at chrom_plot repository.