forums.silverfrost.com

brian.mckenna · Joined: 11 Sep 2007 Posts: 1

Can anyone help me to get pgplot working with silverfrost f95. I've some pupils doing a science fair project and we have working fortran programs that we wish to use to produce graphs.

I have downloaded and unzipped pgplot but am a loss as to how to get silverfrost to see the libraries.

As I learned Fortran in the early 70s (Fortran 4), I am a little behind. Very Happy

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Brian McKenna

jjgermis · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 404 Location: Nürnberg, Germany

Hi Brain

In the ..\pgplot522\pgplot directory there is a sys_salford subdirectory. Here you will find a readme file which contain the steps to create a PGPLOT.LIB library. If you can succeed in this, you should be able to add this as a reference.

Did you perhaps tried this?

JohnHorspool · Joined: 26 Sep 2005 Posts: 270 Location: Gloucestershire UK

The files in sys_salford are 15 years old and were intended to be compiled using Salford Software FTN77.

Unless there are over riding reasons to be using pgplot why not use the supplied graphics library that installs with FTN95 called simpleplot?

jjgermis · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 404 Location: Nürnberg, Germany

John, I agree - unless there are good reasons for pgplot my firts thought was simpleplot as well.

Brian there are several examples showing how to use simpleplot. I think that you might be better off going for that - just add the simpleplot dll as a reference. See the example below.

sparge · Joined: 11 Apr 2005 Posts: 371

Oh boy ... if there is something even approximately stick-shaped in my vicinity, I am world class at getting hold of its wrong end if it has one (or even inventing one if it has not, if necessary). This much I know from long experience; even so, from time to time I still take my own breath away with my unparalleled ability.

I really really hope I am not the only person who had previously stumbled across the SIMPLEPLOT section of the help file, and stopped reading after the first sentence because it sounded like a 3rd party product that needed to be bought separately. I just went back to the help file to find that section again (which took me a little while), and now I see that had I persisted to the second paragraph, the right end of the stick would have been handed to me.

Which is all good news, because I need to build some simple plotting capability into the app I am currently working on, and I have been unsuccessfully trying, since about a week before Christmas, to muster the enthusiasm to go through the process of laboriously rolling my own again. And now it seems I probably won't have to. Yay! Off to read the rest of the Simpleplot documentation now ...

jjgermis · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 404 Location: Nürnberg, Germany

Hi sparge

I am sure you are not the first one to be confused by the documentation. One really gets the impression that this is not maintained anymore. If you take a look at the manual you will that the document is dated 2000. Moreover, if you try the link provided in the manual you will find an error.

Perhaps Silverfrost can clarify the present status of simple plot.

PaulLaidler · Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 4:30 pm Post subject:

The status of SimplePlot has not changed. It is a free third party library that is nolonger maintained. If it works for you then all well and good. As I recall there is primary documentation available somewhere on the Silverfrost web site.

jjgermis · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 404 Location: Nürnberg, Germany

Hi Paul

Thanks for clarity.

The link for SimplePlot: http://www.silverfrost.com/manuals/fmanual3d.pdf

What options does one have (besides SimplePlot) to draw graphics?

PaulLaidler · Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 8:01 pm Post subject:

Clearwin+ has its own graphics control %gr.
You can also use the OpenGL library %og.
%dw is less useful.

DanRRight · Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 7:58 pm Post subject:

Yep, and that's the best way of doing that.

Unfortunate thing about such graphics libraries like pgplot, simpleplot, graphmatic etcetcetc you name it, is that they all are eventually stopped to be supported. Ideal for long run would be something which got acceptance as major scientific graphics software which will never go away like Matlab or Mathematica or perhaps Origin, but about last one i'm not so sure.

Bad things about these popular software packages though is that you can not link them to your FTN95 source code easily. If someone would make for example Origin (or other major package all people use to make presentations or scientific papers) easily callable from FTN95 this would be a major breakthrough of integration of Fortran and graphics. You setup in Origin the professional plot look and then the code will run, prepare the data and plot things automatically which will always look professionally for years and decades of further use of the code.

As to Simpleplot, after my unsuccessful requests to its author, really simplest ones like to fix buggy misplaced axis labels on all its graphs, look at the plot in FTN95 Examples or one ggermis shows above or at 100th of Simpleplot examples in its manual - all its axis labels have the same unacceptable screaming defect as if Simpleplot author suffers from topographical cretinism - i said to all of them FU and wrote my own libraries using %gr and %og. Wrote using the same Fortran compiler. It is really easy to do that. As you all know Fortran will be Fortran even in a year 3000 and it is really hard to believe this unique UK-created Fortran compiler will be abandoned, the Blighty makes some things to last for centuries Smile

Below is an example of everything done in FTN95, no single line in something else. That's some little snippets of the GUI of some 200000 lines plasma physics code.