See revision 9682. I made this change because I think it is a better way to support our cgm device driver. CGM format is a long-established (since 1987) open standard for vector graphics that is supported by w3c (see http://www.w3.org/Graphics/WebCGM/). Despite its openness, CGM has never gotten much support within the free software community (probably because it was ahead of its time). But that doesn't mean we have to continue that trend. I doubt many were using our cgm device before because it depends on the public domain software library, libcd, which is difficult to find, and no longer maintained. OTOH, that library code seems to build without problems on all platforms that our developers have tried so it makes sense to do the build ourselves so it is automatically accessible for everybody who builds PLplot.
I have only lightly tested these changes so far, but if I run the test executables built in lib/nistcd, I generate identical cgm files to those supplied with the libcd tarball. Please give this change a thorough testing. If you don't know how to view the resulting cgm files, they should be convertable to other vector graphics formats such as svg using uniconvertor. However, Debian Lenny let me down in this case (See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=518816). Another possibility for viewing/converting cgm is ralcgm. (That is what the ImageMagick display app uses to view/convert cgm files.) However, Debian let me down there as well since nobody has packaged ralcmg for Debian. An unpatched ralcgm is impossible to build on Linux because the package's configuration is completely Linux unaware. (Yes, that happened back in the mid 90's when ralcgm was programmed). However, I took a patched source from a src rpm that filled in all the Linux configuration information properly, and I got that version to build with no issues. After that build, the "display" application gave good results for our cgm plots within the current limitations of the cgm device (Hershey fonts, no antialising, etc.) Note, if you look at the cgm examples generated by running the tests in lib/nistcd, the text is done with good looking fonts, and the text and lines are nicely antialiased. Thus, it is possible in theory to overcome these current limitations for our cgm device if anybody is interested on working on this device (considering that the external libcd build is no longer a barrier to entry for using -dev cgm). Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
