Re: [Plplot-general] PLplot status on Interactive Platforms

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

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
__________________________