On 2015-07-05 09:25+0100 Phil Rosenberg wrote: > Hi Alan
> Could describe exactly what the -np option should do and also add that to the documentation. At the moment for wxWidgets as soon as a page is rendered we move to the next page, which as you state causes at most a brief flicker of a plot. But this is exactly what the documentation states it should do. Hi Phil: The -np option simply means "no pause" for human interaction (such as waiting for a human to hit the "enter" key to move from one page to the next or to terminate the plot if the last page is being displayed). Let me ask you a question in return. What general method is used by wxPLViewer to actually render a page to the screen? (Note the question concerns the rendering part alone and not the steps leading up to the start of that rendering.) Is that general rendering process expected to be extremely short? For example, I just checked examples/c/x08c -dev wxwidgets -bg 0000FF (note without the -np option), and for each page the associated wxPLViewer gives you a black screen for a while, and then an "instantaneous" render of the entire page including the blue PLplot background specified by the -bg 0000FF option above (as opposed to the default black PLplot background to keep the PLplot background distinguisable from the black background of the wxPLViewer GUI). Such instantaneous rendering results are fine, but I am curious about the general method used to do that instanteous rendering. I have also done some experiments with examples/c/x08c -dev xwin -bg 0000FF The initial render of a page is pretty fast but still slow enough so you can see it happen. But on resizes (which I believe uses the same general method as wxPLViewer) it appears to be instantanous despite the complexities of that plot (which is fine). If you confirm the rendering part should be essentially instantaneous for wxPLViewer, then it appears the wxwidgets device is handling the -np option correctly. However, I strongly suggest a change so the -np option produces more meaningful looking results on multipage examples which is to allow the previous page to be displayed on the screen until the present page is ready to be rendered. So with this model, wxPLViewer would initialize the GUI (which presumably would create the black background), process a page to collect all the data needed for rendering, render the page, terminate the page, then continue with processing the next page without reinitializing the GUI so you would never see the black "GUI" background after the first page was rendered. This change although extremely useful for multipage examples would still leave single-page examples rendered as a brief flicker, but I don't think that can be helped unless we were willing to put pauses in when PLplot exited which I would think would be a bad idea. > Regarding the warnings, I am not sure what to do. How long do you think is sensible to wait for a response from the viewer? This is a balance, because if someone kills the viewer or it crashes then the console will be waiting for a response that never comes. I will look at tuning this, but suggestions welcome. Instead of treating symptoms here I would try and cure the disease which is the rather long times that the combination of wxPLViewer and -dev wxwidgets are currently waiting for each other. For example, if you cure why the second and subsubsequent runs of an example can take up to 16 times longer than the first run of an example, that cure might have implications for runs of single examples, i.e., their wait times might be substantially reduced so the above warning issue might just go away. > I will look into x17 and x26. Thanks, and I look forward to your conclusions concerning those examples. 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); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't Limit Your Business. Reach for the Cloud. GigeNET's Cloud Solutions provide you with the tools and support that you need to offload your IT needs and focus on growing your business. Configured For All Businesses. Start Your Cloud Today. https://www.gigenetcloud.com/ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
