SciPlot Demo Program

• Compilation Instructions
• x/y plotter
  • Screen Shots
  • Usage
  • Input File Format
  • Sample Input File
• Realtime Demo
  • Usage

• SciPlot General Info
• Programmer's Documentation

Compilation Instructions

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.

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

x/y plotter

The SciPlot Demo program takes a text file (or standard input) as input and plots the data from that file as x/y or polar plots. More than one set of x/y (polar) line data may appear in a single plot frame, and more than one plot frame may be displayed on the screen. As shown in the plot frame controls , many features of the SciPlot widget are available for customization before generating a postscript copy.

Screen Shots

Usage

The SciPlot Demo program is made automatically when compiling the SciPlot Widget source code, as shipped. It is called "sciplot" and is executed by typing:

sciplot data.txt

where data.txt is a sciplot input file, described below. Note that sciplot can also read multiple input files on the same command line, or read from standard input.

Input File Format

There are 5 commands that sciplot recognizes in the input file. Optional items are enclosed in [square brackets].

Title [title]

Signifies the start of a new plot, and optionally specifies the title for the plot.

Xaxis [x axis label]

Optional x axis label

Yaxis [y axis label]

Optional y axis label

Polar [rad]

Polar plot flag. If not present, the form is assumed to be a cartesian (x/y) plot.

Line legend-label

Begins a new line of data to be added to the current plot. The values to be added immediately follow this line in the input file; and the program will continue to add lines until another command is reached, or the file ends.

Data is free format, but must be separated by a comma, equal sign, or whitespace. Both the x and y (r and theta) coordinates must appear on the same line of text in the file.

In place of a line of x/y data, the keyword "skip" may be substituted. This causes a break in the current line, which allows lines to contain multiple disjointed line segments.

Any text labels in the file should be enclosed in quotation characters.

Sample Input File

Title="Crack Growth Comparison"
Xaxis="Number of Cycles (kc)"
Yaxis="Crack Depth (mm)"

Line="25% strain"
0.000000e+00    2.000000e+00
1.373497e+02    2.500000e+00
2.403780e+02    3.000000e+00
skip
3.205736e+02    3.500000e+00
3.845680e+02    4.000000e+00

Line="50% strain"
0.000000e+00    2.000000e+00
3.480081e+01    2.500000e+00
6.082956e+01    3.000000e+00
skip
8.105608e+01    3.500000e+00
9.719518e+01    4.000000e+00

Line="100% strain"
0.000000e+00    2.000000e+00
4.212263e+00    2.500000e+00
6.219232e+00    3.000000e+00
7.458972e+00    3.500000e+00
8.387889e+00    4.000000e+00

Realtime Demo

This is just a simple program that uses the realtime updating capabilities of the widget. Instituted in the program is a timed callback (XtAppAddTimeOut) that simply randomly increments one of the points every half second. The plot is redrawn after every update.

Usage

Just execute the program "realtime" to see this demo. It takes no arguments.