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Next: Being Prepared for New Developments in Computer Graphics Up: AIPS++ Note 172: Infrastructure Graphics Previous: Design Principles and Goals

Public Domain and Adopted Software

AIPS++ adopted the Motif widget set after a year's frustrating work with InterViews, and in spite of our admiration for its capabilities and that of its (as yet undelivered) successor, Fresco. Motif is now standard on all commercial workstations (Linux PC's excepted), and a developer's license costs less than a few hundred dollars. It is a mature toolkit and - of immediate benefit to AIPS++ - comes with a large number of truly public domain widgets. We have already made extensive use of XbaeMatrix, a spreadsheet widget from BellCore that forms the heart of the AIPS++ TableBrowser and ArrayEditor.

A short time ago we decided to adopt Richard Gooch's ``Karma'' graphics library rather than to create an X Windows astronomical canvas from scratch. Karma provides an Xt widget which, among other things,

1.: allows the use of astronomical coordinates
2.: supports non-linear coordinate systems
3.: provides easy colormap manipulation
4.: provides postscript output for printing
5.: allows for event handlers which return values in astronomical coordinates and intensities
6.: permits interactive placement of annotations and labels
7.: provides zoom and (soon) pan and scroll
8.: any graphical object (axes, markers, text, region-delimiting polygons) may be either drawn in immediate mode, or entered into an overlay list where it may be later manipulated. All objects can be drawn in astronomical or pixel coordinates.

Next: Being Prepared for New Developments in Computer Graphics Up: AIPS++ Note 172: Infrastructure Graphics Previous: Design Principles and Goals