Alan W. Irwin - 2021-03-01

On 2021-02-27 13:31-0000 oldcodebit wrote:

[...] I could not find examples on such things like running a plot without a menu with a list of output options, although that menu is very useful for the beginners to test - trial display options etc. But there is no example for running a plot say x11 or cairo display mode without popping up menu. Other useful tips would be helpful such as closing plplot window and running plot on the same windows ( live plot or run time plot if possible).

You have probably already found this for yourself, but for others
referring to this discussion in the future, the PLplot command-line
arguments are documented at
http://plplot.org/docbook-manual/plplot-html-5.15.0/arguments.html.

Also, if you use the -DBUILD_TEST=ON cmake option, that makes the
"test_noninteractive" and "test_interactive" targets available for you
to build. (For further detailed information on those targets see
https://sourceforge.net/p/plplot/wiki/Test_System%28CMake_Based%29/.)

You should build those two targets from the top of your
build tree with verbose options on to help see what goes on. For
example for the "Unix Makefiles" cmake generator that is typically the
default CMake generator on Unix you would build those
targets as follows:

make -j<n> VERBOSE=1 test_noninteractive >& test_noninteractive.out
make -j<n> VERBOSE=1 test_interactive >& test_interactive.out</n></n>

where <n> is a number to describe the number of parallel builds you
decide to use to save time. (I typically use -j18 for my Ryzen
hardware which has 16 different hardware threads).</n>

That test_noninteractive target runs all our standard examples in all
languages and for all noninteractive devices. That test_interactive
target runs all our standard examples in C for all our interactive
devices (such as xwin or xcairo) and also a large number of special
examples in a number of different languages that are useful for
demonstrating the interactive nature of PLplot. Many of these
plotting tasks are currently done with bash shell scripts so to answer
many of your questions you will have to dig into
test_noninteractive.out, test_interactive.out AND the shell scripts
that are run to figure out exactly how those noninteractive and
interactive examples are being run.

Note my plan for the future is to implement running all those
test_noninteractive and test_interactive examples directly from CMake
just to (1) make it easier for users like you to understand what is
going on and to (2) make those targets available on platforms without
bash. But honestly this plan is fairly low on my PLplot agenda.
Therefore, for some time to come you will need to dig into bash
scripts to get a lot of your questions answered about how to run
noninteractive and interactive PLplot examples.

Good luck with the rest of your experience with PLplot, and if you
have further questions, I recommend you ask them on the
plplot-general mailing
list
since that gives you more PLplot community support than is available
here.