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

[neil <sal...@ti...>]

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...@be...] 
Sent: 05 April 2014 06:42
To: neil
Cc: plp...@li...
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
__________________________


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