Re: [Plplot-general] Including cairo driver

[Walt B. <wal...@gm...>]

I would not do anything that was driven by
being usable by the Fortran Tools. That just
does not cover enough of your potential users.

Having said that, I would think that anything
that builds and runs in a Mingw-only
environment should work. I don't think I have
had any problem incorporating into the FT
any binary distribution that is built for
Windows.

Alan: do you really want to look at the results
of my build attempts? It seems quite obvious that
there is something "wrong" with my system
configuration or the way I am trying to do things.


On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 8:57 AM, Arjen Markus <Arj...@de...>wrote:

>  HI Walt,
>
>
>
> This has been on our nice-to-have list for quite some time. The real
> problem is that there are many configurations to worry about:
>
> -        Which languages and compilers to support? And which versions?
>
> -        Which external components to support?
>
>
>
> Since we switched to CMake as the configuration tool, things have become
> easier to build and CMake comes with a simple packaging option, so that
> ought to make a binary distribution easier as well, though the above still
> holds.
>
>
>
> If we limit ourselves to the context of FortranTools, the number of
> configurations may get down to something manageable.  Do you have
> suggestions?
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Arjen
>
>
>
> *From:* Walt Brainerd [mailto:wal...@gm...]
> *Sent:* Friday, May 02, 2014 6:38 PM
> *To:* Alan W. Irwin
> *Cc:* plplot_general
>
> *Subject:* Re: [Plplot-general] Including cairo driver
>
>
>
> Thanks for all of that explanation.
>
>
>
> At some point I will try to build pango/cairo and Qt5
>
> from scratch using Mingw only. But obviously I am
>
> not as good at this kind of thing as you guys.
>
>
>
> Maybe something to think about for the future if you
>
> can get somebody with MS Windows experience to
>
> do it--provide a Windows binary package. Most of the
>
> things I use come that way (Mingw, GTK, Code::Blocks,
>
> etc.) That makes it a whole lot easier for people like
>
> me who are not so good at building things from scratch.
>
>
>
> Anyway, thanks again.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 8:19 PM, Alan W. Irwin <ir...@be...>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Walt:
>
> On 2014-05-01 17:06-0700 Walt Brainerd wrote:
>
> > I lied. I didn't completely give up and have made some
> > progress.
> >
> > I completely disabled cygwin and went back to the command
> > and version of cmake that Darius suggested with Mingw files.
> >
> > This is OK because the Fortran Tools do not include cygwin
> > (just mingw) so the compilations can be consistent. I think all
> > the problems have been caused by multiple versions of libraries
> > and incorrect paths, but who knows ...
>
> I think that is an extremely likely explanation.  But if you are
> careful (in the way I stated previously to you) to set environment
> variables so that for MinGW you stick completely to MinGW dependencies
> and for Cygwin you stick completely to Cygwin dependencies, you should
> be able to build PLplot under both Cygwin and MinGW on one box.
>
> > I still can't get cairo, but that is OK.
>
> The PLplot dependencies on external libraries are currently a big
> issue for MinGW.  To get pretty close to what you have on Cygwin, you
> would need at least binary versions of Qt5 and the pango/cairo subset
> of the GTK+ stack of libraries which are needed by our "qt" and cairo
> device drivers.  Those are our two best such device drivers and they
> implement a substantial number of devices between them including those
> which implement the PNG, JPEG, and PDF formats as well as many other
> formats. If you download binary versions of Qt5 and pango/cairo it is
> unlikely that either/both are going to be ABI consistent with the
> single MinGW version you use to build PLplot.  So really the only good
> choice is to build the external libraries yourself with exactly the
> same MinGW version you use to build PLplot.  That should be
> straightforward to do because those external libraries are all
> open-source with well-defined procedures for building with MinGW on
> Windows.  But it is not an easy task because the Windows build lore
> that is required for each different piece of software is often hard to
> dig out of the google noise.  I am working to fix that situation with
> the epa_build idea (see below), but for now those who use MinGW
> normally settle for an extremely light-weight version of PLplot
> without the cairo, qt, and wxwidgets device drivers which means
> essentially only the ps, svg, and wingcc devices are available for
> MinGW.
>
> > The examples x??f.f90 work
> > and I was able to provide all the files needed to relocate (necessary
> > to distribute). So I am pretty happy. And plan to include plplot in
> > the next version of the Fortran Tools. I need to write up a little
> > section explaining it with a couple of simple examples, just like
> > I have done with the other tools (fortran.com/Fortran_Tools.pdf).
> >
> > One last attempt: can any of you point me to how to build things
> > so that I can generate a jpeg, tif, png, etc. file? This would be a
> > nice feature to include. I can produce a .svg file that can be
> > inserted as a picture into an Open Office document and I can
> > generate with wingcc on the screen and incorporate the plot
> > into Word as a screen shot, so those are two ways to keep the
> > plotting results that I know how to do.
>
> See explanation above about why the MinGW version of PLplot is so
> limited for now.  I do have a subproject of PLplot called epa_build
> (see cmake/epa_build/README) which allows you to conveniently build
> all PLplot dependencies (other than octave which I have not epa_build
> configured yet) on Unix.  And all aspects of the epa_build approach
> should eventually work on MinGW as well.  In fact, every external
> library package that epa_builds on Unix also epa_builds on MinGW
> except for Qt5 and the pango/cairo subset of GTK+. Digging out the
> Windows lore on how to build those packages takes some effort as well
> as a lot of build experimentation, and, in fact, I cannot do that
> build experimentation myself because I don't have access to Microsoft
> Windows. So I am currently looking for someone who does have such
> access who is willing to do the work (with backup help from me) to get
> Qt5 and pango/cairo epa_build to MinGW.  That is a really important
> project from the PLplot prospective since it will transform MinGW from
> a light-weight PLplot platform to a powerful PLplot platform.
>
> Meanwhile, Cygwin already has all the PLplot dependencies available in
> an ABI consistent way.  And Arjen has run with this possibility and
> demonstrated that essentially all PLplot functionality works on
> Cygwin.  So that powerful PLplot platform is the one I recommend to
> our Windows users for now if they need more than just PostScript or
> SVG results.
>
> 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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> Walt Brainerd
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-- 
Walt Brainerd