Re: [Plplot-general] wxWidgets driver -- change the default black background

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

On 2016-10-05 18:42-0400 Pedro Vicente wrote:

> Hi
>
>
> I am trying to change the default black background color using the wxWidgets driver
>
> If using the SVG driver this can be done as explained here
>
> https://sourceforge.net/p/plplot/mailman/message/2817799/
>
> the trick being calling
>
> plscolbg()
>
> before
>
> plinit();
>

Hi Pedro:

You are correct.  You should be able to specify background colour for
all devices if they have been programmed correctly, but it turns out
you have found a wxwidgets-related bug.  The rest of this is directed
to Phil since the wxwidgets-related code is his, and I have verified
the bug in perhaps a more standard way than your example.

@Phil, will you look into this please?

To verify this bug myself, I did the following steps which you should
be able to replicate for yourself.

* Run cmake with the -DBUILD_TEST=ON option which configures
the build of our standard examples.

* Build a standard example (the 00 standard example in C in this case,
but any other standard example will likely also demonstrate this bug).

make x00c

* Build several different devices to try.

make svg
make xwin
make wxwidgets wxPLViewer  #wxwidgets interacts with wxPLViewer at run time so both have to be built

* Run the 00 standard example with different devices and with a blue
background specified.  (The -bg option is the same as calling plscolbg
before plinit in the standard example, and the -bg colour is specified
with the standard RRGGBB hexadecimal notation so 0000FF is saturated
blue)

examples/c/x00c -dev svg -bg 0000FF -o test.svg
examples/c/x00c -dev xwin -bg 0000FF
examples/c/x00c -dev wxwidgets -bg 0000FF

I found that the svg and xwin results had the specified blue
background, but the wxPLViewer instance that was automatically
launched and communicated with by -dev wxwidgets rendered the
background as the default black rather than the specified blue ==>
BUG.  I don't know if that is a bug in -dev wxwidgets, a bug in the
way background colours are communicated to the wxPLViewer instance,
and/or a bug in the wxPLViewer code, but I assume you will be readily
able to figure this out from your knowledge of each of these
components of our wxwidgets-related code.

To my mind, the highest priority is to get -dev wxwidgets to work
properly with -bg as requested above, but as a much lower priority it
would be good to build most of the standard PLplot command-line
parsing (likely mostly everything other than -dev and -o) into
examples/c++/wxPLplotDemo.cpp so that it would be possible, for
example to run

examples/c++/wxPLplotDemo -bg 0000FF -geometry -geometry 500x1000

and get the specified blue background and geometry for that example.

Just to remind you and others here, please run, e.g.,

examples/c/x00c -h

to get help on all the PLplot options that can be parsed from the
command line.

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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