Alan, Thank you for your comments.
I'm working primarily on Windows 7, but could you say on which of the interactive widgets it might be easiest to implement things like: 1) view a surface plot from a range of directions; 2) use the cursor to extract the numerical values of particular data points on the plot; 3) rescale the axis or the plot? Many thanks, neil -----Original Message----- From: Alan W. Irwin [mailto:ir...@beluga.phys.uvic.ca] Sent: 05 April 2014 06:42 To: neil Cc: plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Plplot-general] PLplot status on Interactive Platforms On 2014-04-04 22:42+0100 neil wrote: > Dear All, > > > > What is the current PLplot status on the functionality of the > Interactive Platforms. I see on the main PLplot webpage there is > reference to a number of platforms Qt, wx Widgets and the like? There > is little guidance in the manual as to how these work and it's not > clear from the examples if they are included. I'm basically looking to > make surface plots then change view position so I can see the plots > from any number of directions, basically for data analysis. Does such > a capability currently exist in PLplot, and if so which Interactive > Platform (Qt, Tcl, wx Widgets, .....) might be the best for this purpose? It very much depends on your platform, and which PLplot dependencies are available on that platform. For Windows (other than Cygwin) you ordinarily would have to download binary versions of the dependencies or else build them yourself (e.g., with epa_build, see cmake/epa_build/README). However, sometimes there are ABI difficulties with dependencies that are downloaded in binary form. That is by definition (since they same compiler is used to build the PLplot dependencies and PLplot itself) not an issue with epa_build, but that project is still in its infancy and has by an large not yet been debugged on Windows. Note, figuring out the epa_build tweaks required to build all dependencies of PLplot should be straightforward since the the Windows build information is publicly available. However, the difficulty is wading through a mass of Windows build material for the PLplot dependencies to find what is relevant. On Unix (especially Linux) all PLplot dependencies are normally readily available. Whatever, your platform and the dependencies that are available for that platform, the PLplot build system will adjust the PLplot build accordingly to skip components (with a WARNING message) that cannot work because of unavailable dependencies. The build system also implements a lot of tests for the components of PLplot that are built. Those test scripts are implemented with bash and other Unix-like tools. So on non-Cygwin Windows you have to have MSYS on your PATH (but not necessarily MinGW) in order for the tests to be implemented. But assuming you specified -DBUILD_TEST=ON and have MSYS on Windows or you are on some Unix-like platform, then you can review all targets available using the "make help" or "nmake help" commands. For example, our interactive devices are typically related to tk, cairo, qt, and wxwidgets. So to find out what is possible, use, e.g., software@raven> make help |grep tk ... plplottcltk ... plplottcltk_Main ... tclIndex_tk ... ntk ... test_ntk_dyndriver ... test_tk_dyndriver ... test_tkwin_dyndriver ... tk ... tkwin ... test_c_ntk ... test_c_tk ... test_octave_ntk ... test_octave_tk ... test_tk_01 ... test_tk_02 ... test_tk_03 ... test_tk_04 ... test_tk_plgrid ... target_xgtk_interfaceocaml ... tclIndex_examples_tk ... xtk01 ... xtk02 ... xtk04 and similarly for cairo, qt, and wx. The try running some of those targets to see what you get, e.g., make test_c_tk Once, you find a target you would like to investigate further, typically they are implemented in examples/CMakeLists.txt with all their dependencies indicated in that file as well. Note, also there is an overall interactive target called test_interactive whose dependencies are the most reliable of the interactive tests. So try "make interactive" to get a feel for virtually everything interactive that is available on your platform. 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 __________________________ ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2014.0.4355 / Virus Database: 3722/7300 - Release Date: 04/04/14 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Put Bad Developers to Shame Dominate Development with Jenkins Continuous Integration Continuously Automate Build, Test & Deployment Start a new project now. 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