README for SciPlot Widget, version 1.3 Robert W. McMullen 20 Feb 1996 OVERVIEW The SciPlot Widget is a widget capable of plotting cartesian or polar graphs, including logarithmic axes in cartesian plots. The widget is subclassed directly from the Core widget class, which means that it does not depend upon any other widget set. It may be freely used with Athena, Motif, or the Open Look/Xview widget sets. (There is optional Motif support that causes the widget to be subclassed from XmPrimitive. See the man page.) Features provided in the widget include automatic scaling, legend drawing, axis labeling, PostScript output, multiple plotted lines, color support, user font specification, dashed lines, symbols drawn at points, logarithmic scales on one or both axes in cartesian plots, and degrees or radians as angles in polar plots. SOURCE LOCATION Source code for the SciPlot Widget is available via anonymous ftp on ftp.x.org in /contrib/widgets as SciPlot-?.?.tar.gz. I have also set up the Offical SciPlot Web Site (tm) at http://www.ae.utexas.edu/~rwmcm/SciPlot.html that should always include the latest patchlevel update. REQUIREMENTS The SciPlot code requires X11R4 or later and a C compiler. The code was designed using ANSI C, but compiles fine with a non-ANSI compiler as long as the compiler understands new-style function prototypes. DEMO PROGRAMS Shipped with the source code distribution are two demo programs that show some of the features of the SciPlot widget. NOTE! The demo programs require Motif, but the SciPlot widget itself does not. The program "sciplot" uses x/y data from a text file and pops up a plot on the screen. The other program "realtime" shows the new quick updating feature of the widget, making the widget better suited for realtime display purposes. If you have the program imake installed, you may use the supplied Imakefile to generate a Makefile. Otherwise, copy the file Makefile.noImake to Makefile, and edit that to conform to your system. Actually, other than specifying the C compiler to use, the Makefile should require little customization. To generate the Makefile, type: xmkmf To compile both demo programs, type: make See the HTML documentation for more information on using the demo programs, but a quick start for each of the programs would be: sciplot data.txt realtime USING THE WIDGET Instructions on how to use the SciPlot widget in your own code is documented in the manual page (SciPlot.man) included with the source code. The documentation is now provided in HTML format, and the manual page is generated from the HTML code. IMPROVEMENTS/PATCHES/BUG REPORTS If you make improvements in this widget (or, YIKES!, if you find bugs) please let me know at rwmcm@orion.ae.utexas.edu, or through the SciPlot Widget home page at http://www.ae.utexas.edu/~rwmcm/SciPlot.html ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE LESSTIF PROJECT I decided to use the Motif toolkit for the demo programs for two reasons. First, most of the requests that I get (for all my widgets) are "how do you use this with Motif?", so I decided to help all the Motif users out by supplying these more complete demos. And second, (plug, plug) I am now a core team member of the LessTif project. Although Lesstif cannot quite deal with the complicated demo programs at the time of this writing, it is quickly developing. Check the site http://www.hungry.com/products/lesstif/ for more information. AUTHOR Robert W. McMullen See the copyright notice for licensing restrictions. Note that the GNU _LIBRARY_ General Public Licesce is not the same as the standard GPL. Patches, improvements, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome at the above e-mail address. I will periodically post patches and improvements to ftp.x.org and the SciPlot web page at http://www.ae.utexas.edu/~rwmcm/SciPlot.html THANKS Thanks to the following people for providing fixes and suggestions: Todd Smith Walter Underwood Michael Katzmann John Moyer Mike Kienenberger Glenn Golden COPYRIGHT Copyright (c) 1996 Robert W. McMullen Portions of the SciPlot Widget source code, as marked, are: Copyright (c) 1993 Alan Richardson (mppa3@syma.sussex.ac.uk) This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Library General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Library General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.