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Gpc-Qt4-002-3

April 5, 2013

Sourceforge Users: This is work in progress (TM) Download GPC-Qt4-002-3 here.


Overall Organization

Gpc-Qt is a source library of routines that enable you to generate high quality graphics on either Linux or MS Windows. It is a system for a display of linear x-y plots, linear contour plots, 3-D contours, polar plots, pie charts, error function plots, wedge plots, log-log plots, 3-D surfaces, 3-D bars, bar charts, smith charts, polar contour plots and triangle contour plots. Also a plot of the daemon db of the CPU temperature. It has its own font design system, as of now not yet interactive.

History

In 1990 I wanted a system to draw astrological charts. I needed something that would draw astrological symbols and draw them in circular fashion. Version 5.0 of this system did that. It ran on DOS. GPC-Qt is a Qt port of that system, with rewrite of the display code.

Picture and Play

A graph can be saved as a picture, and be played back anytime by selecting the appropriate menu items.

Applications included

Included are 4 applications and 27 sample programs. The applications are an astrological program to draw natal charts and transit charts based only on time of birth and geographical position of birth. The latter 2 must be provided by the user. The second application is a set of graphs of stock market funds. It reads the data from a DBIII+ database as provided by FlagShip. The other applications are a system uptime display and a CPU temperature display.

Prerequisites

  1. Any Qt version 4, for example from http://qt-project.org/downloads It has been tested on:
    • Linux Debian (unstable/testing g++ 4:4.7.2-1) libqt4-dev 4:4.8.2+dfsg-11
    • Windows-XP (mingw32-gcc-3.4.2) Qt by Trolltech v4.3.1 (OpenSource)
  2. FlagShip if you want to use the DBIII+ interfaces. You can get that here:
    http://www.fship.com/

Documentation

Documentation is included in the distribution file in the form of LaTeX .tex files and in the html subdirectory as .html files that can be browsed. In order to print the documents LaTeX must be used to format them. To reproduce the .html files Hyperlatex (http://hyperlatex.sourceforge.net/) must be used to format the .tex files. There are 3 documents:

  1. Application Programming Interface (API), a description of all of the gpc-qt subroutines. This is named api.tex. The browsable file is api.html.
  2. A general description, what you are looking at, named info.tex and info.html .
  3. A user guide, named userguide.tex and userguide.html .

Installation

  1. Install Qt first, or have it already installed.
  2. If using MS Windows uncomment this line in incude/user.h:
    /*#define Q_TNC     */     /* Indicates usage of Qt Non-Commercial Windows version */
    
  3. Untar GPC-Qt4-002-3.
  4. Linux: cd to the directory where GPC-Qt4-002 was installed.
    • run: qmake-qt4 <name>.pro -o Makefile where <name> is a sample program or application that you want to compile.
    • run: make
    • run the application in a terminal window on X.
  5. MS Windows:
    • Open the QT CommandPrompt window and run:
      qmake <path><name>.pro -o <path>Makefile  
      

      where <name> is any of the included .pro files and <path> is where GPC-Qt4-002 is installed.

    • run:
      mingw32-make -C <path to GPC-Qt4-002>
      
    • Copy the generated application to the directory of the QT CommandPrompt window, together with the associated .ini files, like application.ini, also the fonts (*.fnt) and the message file, messages.dat.
    • Execute the generated application in the same.

Adjustments

Adjustments of the frame and client area for different versions + windowmanagers.
Note: this only has been tried on Windows-XP, Fvwm and KDE. It seems that only Windows gets it right the first time. Parameters refer to entries in application.ini. Can be changed with an editor or with the Adj button. Before playing with these parms, try it as is first.


Adjustme

nts of the frame and client area

Affecting

Variable 3.1.1-Emb. 3.1.1-x11 3.0.5-x11 2.3.0-NC 2.3.1-x11 1.45-x11

Window Mgr

. . Fvwm KDE2 KDE3 Win Fvwm KDE2 Fvwm KDE2
Frame desktop_x_off 0 7 0 0 7 7 0 7 0
. desktop_y_off 0 31 0 0 31 31 0 31 0
. width_diff 8 12 8 40 12 12 8 12 8
. client_height_diff 28 35 29 30 35 35 29 35 28
client-area fs_view_height_diff 80 96 96 108 112 96 96 96 96
. nl_view_height_diff 53 52 52 72 80 52 52 52 67
Font main_window_font h* h* h* h* h* h* h* h* h*
. font_point_size 12 12 12 12 112 12 12 12 12
. font_weight 55 55 55 60 112 55 55 55 55


h* = helvetica
KDE2 = KDE2.2
KDE3 = KDE3.1
Why? This is mainly to suit F11-Fullscreen. What I wanted was a fullscreen that remembered when it was not fullscreen. That is what F11 does across executions.

How it works

Each application has a main, which sets up 2 parameter arrays. A global and a local one. These are large files called application.ini and <application>.ini A large amount of the parameters are needed. Many are historical. Then it sets up the application window object. This sets up an application window and paints the "user-code" inside of it. All user code is a function called gpc_main. It contains any number of gpc-qt calls in a specific order. Gpc-qt was not designed with OOP and is in principle not reusable code. Qt on the other hand assumes that all usercode IS reusable (or repaintable). So occasionally there are problems. The worst of these are sudden segfaults if you put something in the wrong place or not do something necessary. To enable multiple plots a variable called "next" is used. First plot is painted when "next" is 0, and so on. Each sample has an "About" with it that summarizes what this thing does.

Description of the parameter record

Application parameters

Each application has its own paramers. (E.g aa = aa.ini) In there you can select tracing parameters:
Debug now selects with "trace_<0-x>" in local vars.

Description of the Main Window

After executing the gpc-qt program the user sees a blank main window. Hit PF2 or select (Re)Draw in File to start it. The size of the main window depends on what "maxw" and "maxh" are set at in application.ini. The viewport depends on what "vox" "voy" "viw" and "vih" are set at. All of these can be changed with the Adjustment menu.

Full Screen

F11 is a "fullscreen" key. You hit it and the mainwindow fills your screen. Hitting it again returns the display to the size it was at before F11 was hit. This is remembered across sessions, so you can remain in F11 mode on repeated invocations.

Writing your own code

Take an example that is closest to what you want to do and fiddle with it.

Caveats

Bugs and Changelog

This is a mix of code going back to DOS over 10 or more years. That code was non OOP. Specifically when switching between root/non-root the code will segfault when trying to write to the .tkf and .OFF files. Delete those first!

Following was changed from Gpc-Qt4-002-2:

List of applications/samples

Time to exec is on a 3000MHz box with 13GB RAM and a GeForce 8400 GS videocard.


List of

applications

Name

Exec Function Last
- (secs) - exec

aa

31 Astrological program. Draws natal + transit charts. 03/02/11-14:57:14
. 56 03/12/07-08:30:14
astrosyms 30 Draws explanation of astrological symbols in Spanish. 05/02/11-10:10:51
bar 52 Draws bar chart with legend. Shows duration warning message. 05/02/11-10:12:59
bar3d 10 Draws 3d bars. 05/02/11-10:13:51
bess 11 2-D projection within a grid. 05/02/11-10:16:38
clrtest 3 Semi-log plots. 3 plots. 05/02/11-10:23:56
. 4 05/02/11-10:24:05
. 3 05/02/11-10:23:40
cnttest 3 Contour plot. 05/02/11-11:15:25
d2test 19 Draws 4 plots on one page. 05/02/11-11:19:26
d3test 7 Plots 3-D surfaces. 2 plots. 05/02/11-10:00:29
. 9 05/02/11-10:00:07
delays 60 Plots a non-linear polar grid plot from a datafile. 05/02/11-10:02:51
do_linestyles 11 Plots the line styles that can be selected. 05/02/11-10:06:00
do_sysup 15 Plots system uptimes by month or total from DB. 05/02/11-11:56:54
. 45 05/02/11-11:25:45
do_test_gpc 74 Lists all disk partitions and their usage. 05/02/11-11:32:58
erftest 1 Plots a single curve on an error function grid. 05/02/11-11:38:15
exh 9 Plots the E by H vectors on the Z axis. 05/02/11-11:40:26
filltest 12 Example of using surmat() to draw 3-D surfaces. 05/02/11-11:42:44
. 92 05/02/11-11:44:21
fnttest1 21 Plots a sample of many fonts. 05/02/11-11:49:51
fonttabl 5 Plots a font with all ascii characters. Select from File-Open. 05/02/11-11:52:30
funds 24 Database extraction. 5 mutual fund plots. Last one contour. 05/02/11-11:54:46
. 20 05/02/11-11:58:05
. 21 05/02/11-11:58:32
. 22 05/02/11-11:59:03
. 829 30/11/07-05:55:55
jcont 16 Proton tokamak orbit plot. 05/02/11-12:01:11
logtest 5 Semi-log and log-log plot. 2 plots. 05/02/11-12:03:07
. 8 05/02/11-12:03:19
modtempdisp 30 Multiplot of CPU temos from DB. 05/02/11-12:10:27
. 22 05/02/11-12:11:12
pat16 6 Plots patterns 1-16 and GPC colors 200-447 05/02/11-12:13:48
pattern 6 Plots 16 IBM colors + 16 pats + colors 50-174 05/02/11-12:28:24
pie 26 Plots a pie chart. 05/02/11-12:30:21
poltest 4 Plots 2 polar plots. 05/02/11-12:32:10
. 4 05/02/11-12:32:01
r3test 13 Plots 3-D surface and contour map of random points. 2 plots. 05/02/11-12:34:08
. 4 05/02/11-12:34:19
rates 7 Plots airport arrivals. 3 plots. Boxplot + 2 contours. Warning. 05/02/11-12:36:23
. 356 05/02/11-12:42:23
. 276 05/02/11-12:47:32
sample 14 Simple sample x-y plot. 05/02/11-12:52:42
smtest 3 05/02/11-12:54:28
vfield 10 Vector field plot. 05/02/11-13:00:45


Contact

gpc-qt at users dot sourceforge dot net

Index

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A
About
Accelerator keys
Adj menu button
Adjustments of the frame and client area
API
Application parameters
Astro menu button
astrological charts
C
contact
D
Debug menu button
Description of the Main Window
Description of the parameter record
F
File menu button
First
FlagShip
Format
H
How it works
I
info.tex
N
Next
O
OOP
Open menu button
P
Picture menu button
Play menu button
Prev
Print menu button
Q
Quit menu button
R
reason for adjustments of the frame and client area
Redraw menu button
Rotate
Rubberbanding
S
Save menu button
Sequence menu button
U
userguide.tex
V
View
Z
Zoom

Hugo M. Van Woerkom, April 5, 2013 (HyperLatex - 3.8.1-nodeb-amd64 on /HDB6.boot/vmlinuz-3.8.1-nodeb-amd64(HDB6))