Hi Divakar: On 2011-11-07 12:52-0500 Divakar Viswanath wrote:
> I tried to install plplot using the directions given at > http://www.miscdebris.net/plplot_wiki/index.php?title=Building_PLplot > > The installation gave a number of warnings (listed at the end of this email). > One of the warnings is: > > -- WARNING: pango, pangoft2, or lasi not found with pkg-config. > Setting PLD_psttf to OFF. Please install all of these packages > and/or set the environment variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH appropriately. > > Any help getting rid of this warning would be most helpful. > > I am on the Linux system "Linux version 2.6.18-238.19.1.el5 > ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat > 4.1.2-50)) #1 SMP " and information on the internet seems to suggest that > pango is integrated into Linux. But I have no idea where to > find these packages. Such an old Linux system (kernel 2.6.18 was released 5 (!) years ago) is a major concern. Our principal C library should build OK since it does not have a lot of dependencies on other libraries. Also, the simple ps (which supplies the ps and psc devices) and svg (which supplies the svg device) device drivers should build OK because they don't have any other library dependencies. The WARNING messages below are simply telling you that the build system is eliminating parts of PLplot that cannot be built properly on your system. But what remains should still work. So I suggest you go ahead with building and installing PLplot and try out the psc and svg devices to get a "feel" for what PLplot can do for you. Note you may be only limited to viewing the results from the psc device since Linux SVG viewers were either nonexistent or extremely buggy 5 years ago. If you like that first taste of PLplot, then sophisticated PLplot device drivers such as psttf, cairo, or qt are probably what you need (see comments below), but they do depend strongly on external libraries (respectively libLASi, the pango and cairo libraries, and the Qt4 stack of libraries). Those libraries will be either nonexistent on your system or in such a primitive and buggy early state that they cannot be used by our device drivers. > > I want to use plplot for generating png/postscript/pdf within C programs and > I do not want a GUI or interactive platform. Note that -dev psttf only supplies PostScript results (although much better-looking than those from -dev psc). Furthermore, its libLASi dependency in turn depends on the pango/cairo subset of the GTK+ stack of libraries (see discussion below). So there is no reduction of dependencies when you go with this choice. To satisfy all of your png/postscript/pdf needs I suggest you instead try either our cairo device driver (which supplies the pngcairo, pscairo, and pdfcairo devices amongst many others) or else our qt device driver (which supplies the pngqt, epsqt, and pdfqt devices amongst many others). Let's suppose you decide to use the cairo devices. Then you have just two choices. (i) Build a modern GTK+ stack of libraries (that stack includes pango and cairo as well as all other libraries those libraries depend on) on your current ancient Linux distribution. (ii) Install a modern Linux distribution. Choice (i) is very far from trivial (I did that myself years ago, but that was so difficult I wouldn't want to do it again). Thus, I would suggest you try (ii) instead. If you decided to use qt instead, then you have the choice of building the Qt4 stack of libraries on your ancient Linux distribution or else installing a modern Linux distro. I suggest the latter choice is the much easier one. Whatever you decide to do, let us know how it goes. Thanks for your interest in using PLplot. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
