Re: [XForms] GL Utility??

[Jens Thoms Toerring]

Hello Dave,

On Sun, Jan 03, 2010 at 03:30:37AM +0000, David Strang wrote:
> I just downloaded and configured xforms 1.0.93 the other night and
> everything seemed to build correctly on my Ubuntu 9.04 box. I wanted
> to test everything before I run "make install". I already have xforms 1.0.90
> installed from the Ubuntu package manager. 
> 
> I would like to have the GL code working correctly. The configure found
> enough GL to allow the "gl, glwin" examples to be built. The example "gl"
> seems to run okay as its the spining box. The other example, "glwin" opens
> up a window with nothing in it and appears to lock onto the background,
> even while I drag (slowly) the window around the screen. Seems like the
> code can't draw the window background and subsequent redraws are
> bottled up.

Thanks for pointing out the problem. I had a quick look and it
looks like the problem was with mapping the window - after map-
ping it the library waits for a MapNotify event, but this event
wasn't requested for the GL window. Once I added that to the
events requested for the window things work again.

There's a new pre-release for 1.0.93 coming soon and with that
the glwin demo program should work again.

> Now, I have GLUT and MESA available to me. There is a README that 
> mentions re-compiling the library with "FORMS/gl.c" Where does "gl.c"
> come from. Isn't "FORMS/gl.c" in the default code, so its already there,
> or should "gl.c" come from the MESA/GLUT includes?

Actually, I have no idea what that is supposed to mean either.
I had forgotten that the demos/01README file exists at all and
thus didn't updated it. I guess I will have to remove the com-
plete paragraph (and make a few more adjustments).

> I would like to keep the 1.0.93 library local, how do I do a "make install"
> into a home folder?

That can quite easily adjusted while running 'configure'. Just
add '--prefix=$HOME' (or set 'prefix' to wherever you want to
install to) to the flags you pass to 'configure'. You also can
have finer grainer control over where things get installed, run
'./configure --help' to get a list of all options (the ones for
where to install are at top).

> Another project I have is to use PLPLOT as my data plotting tool. PLPLOT is
> a nice, feature rich and fairly mature package. How can I get PLPLOT to
> plot into a Xforms window? Seems like I would need to get the PLPLOT
> routines the window ID. How does Xforms handle window IDs. Seems like
> I will have to reconcile the methods each package uses to handle windows
> and build  a custom version of each. As a side note, PLPLOT has support
> for the Gnome/GTK canvas. Problem is, its buggy and not fully developed
> and the person who developed it is no longer doing such.

That's a bit difficult for me to say since I have no experience
at all with PLPLOT and a quick look at the documentation makes
it look as if some extra code will be needed to get it to work
with XForms - if some wrapper code for GTK or wxWidgets is nee-
ded then rather likely also for XForms. With my extremely limi-
ted understanding of what PLPLOT works I can't make any state-
ments how much work this might require. I guess you are going
to need a XForms Canvas and then get PLPLOT to draw into its
window (the canvas' window is a simple X Window, so if PLPLOT
can draw into X Windows you may not have to write too much
glue code - but that's pure guesswork...).

                                Best regards, Jens
-- 
  \   Jens Thoms Toerring  ________      address@hidden
   \_______________________________      http://toerring.de