Richard, On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 11:44 +0100, Richard Jackson wrote: > It's not an option for me to use another driver such as Cairo under > Windows, > I have a large Fedora Qt application, Plplot is only a part of it. > It's a > requirement for me to make a port of it for Windows so I guess I'm > just > going to have to look at other plotting packages, unless anyone has > any more > suggestions. Am I really the only person using Qt/Plplot with Windows?
No you're not. We likewise built a large Qt application called QSAS and eventually needed to support it on Windows (and MacOS) in addition to the *nix platforms on which it was initially developed. And my team wrote the initial plplot qt drivers for that purpose, to replace the older fortran-based pgplot routines we used up to then. Since then, of course, the plplot core team have modified and improved the plplot qt drivers we delivered to them; we pick up newer plplot versions from time to time. Instead of relying on separate installations of plplot and such, we bundle much of the source code with our own, and use our own build scripts to compile and link it all together. On our *nix platforms we use autoconf rather than Cmake. Some of this of course might be regarded as heresy by the plplot purists, e.g.: * we aren't up-to-date with plplot releases * we don't use Cmake * we don't build any drivers apart from the qt ones but it works for us and our user community. Using qt also enables you to embed graphics in qt widgets adorned with control buttons, sliders, etc., and generally makes for a very consistent clean user interface and experience. Before you get too excited I need to come clean a bit. The person on the team who successfully ported QSAS to Windows is no longer with us. We rely on somewhat blindly following his recipe. We live in fear that something in Windows or qt or mingw or whatever will grow into a brick wall that we lack the time, energy, and expertise to solve (this is much wider, of course, than just the plplot component of QSAS). If you are interested in pursuing this, I would suggest that you download the Windows version of QSAS and see if it runs out of the box on your platform; we ship binaries for Windows due to the difficulty in building it, and ditto for our Mac version, whereas the *nix ones are usually built from source by our users. If so, that may give you some incentive to pursue further; if not, we'd like to hear about it in order to see if there is something we need to fix. Then I'd suggest you look at the "recipe" to which I referred above, which I'll send to you off-line; it is build_windows.txt and lives in our doc directory. That may give some clues to help you. In particular, my ex-colleague includes several tips about what to check/not check at various stages of the mingw installation. You can pick pick up QSAS at: http://www.sp.ph.ic.ac.uk/csc-web/QSAS/ HTH, and good luck Best wishes Steve PS: I've bcc'ed this to my colleague who maintains and develops our software. You can reach us at csc-support...@imperial.ac.uk -- +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ Professor Steven J Schwartz Phone: +44-(0)20-7594-7660 Head, Space & Atmospheric Physics Fax: +44-(0)20-7594-7772 The Blackett Laboratory E-mail: s.schwa...@imperial.ac.uk Imperial College London Office: Huxley 6M67A London SW7 2AZ, U.K. Web: www.sp.ph.ic.ac.uk/~sjs +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ vRanger cuts backup time in half-while increasing security. With the market-leading solution for virtual backup and recovery, you get blazing-fast, flexible, and affordable data protection. Download your free trial now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/quest-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
