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Getting started with plt under MS-Windows

If you will be using plt under Unix or Linux, please skip ahead to section 2.3 below.

If you have installed the optional XFree86 packages available with Cygwin, you can run plt in exactly the same way as under Unix or Linux if you start it from an X terminal window (run startx first to start the X server if it is not running already).

Under MS-Windows, if the X server has not been installed or is not running, plt can be run in a Cygwin/bash terminal emulator window and can generate PostScript plots. These can be viewed and printed using GSView. If you have not already installed plt, GSView, and Cygwin, please see appendix F, beginning on page [*].

When using plt under MS-Windows without the X server running, always send the output to lwcat. There are two ways to do this:

  1. Send the output via a pipe, as in ``plt ... | lwcat''. (This is the recommended method.)

  2. Collect the output in a file, as in ``plt ... $>$output.plt'', then read the file, as in ``lwcat $<$output.plt''. Note that the output file does not contain a PostScript prolog, so it cannot be printed directly; lwcat is responsible for adding the prolog.

You can easily follow along with all of the examples in this book, which work under MS-Windows in the same way as under Unix or Linux, if you simply add ``| lwcat'' to the end of each plt command. When you do this, the output of plt (which, under MS-Windows, is always in PostScript format) is opened in a GSView window. Using GSView's controls, you can save the plot as a file, print it (on any MS-Windows printer, not just on PostScript printers), and view it at natural or magnified scales.



You might reasonably wonder why lwcat is not part of plt. The reason is that the output of several plt commands can be concatenated and supplied to lwcat in a single batch to create multiple plots on a single page (see chapter 7). To do this, group the plt commands together within a pair of parentheses, separating them with newlines or semicolons; then send the output of the entire group to lwcat, either like this:

( plt data1 ... ; plt data2 ...; plt data3 ... ) | lwcat

or like this:

( plt data1 ... ; plt data2 ...; plt data3 ... ) >output.plt
lwcat <output.plt

If you are paying particularly close attention while reading the rest of this book, you may notice that plt accepts the option -T lw to specify PostScript output, and that lwcat accepts the option -gv to specify that the output is to be opened using gv (GSView under MS-Windows). If you are running plt and lwcat in a Cygwin/bash window, these behaviors are the defaults, and these options can be omitted. If you attempt to run plt in a DOS window (which is not recommended), or in some other way (also not recommended), you will need to use these options explicitly.


next up previous contents index
Next: More about options Up: Getting Started with plt Previous: plt Essentials
George B. Moody (george@mit.edu)
2002-10-11