xmgrace-patch

patch to improve usability of the 2D plotting program xmgrace incorporating the patch of N Ferralis.

Additional software

• xmgrace of course
• libGD is required for computing bounding boxes of raster image formats. It is optional and will be automatically detected.
• pdflib-lite is required for PDF output. You can find the source code or a Homebrew formula.

How to apply

go to the grace root directory:

cd grace-<version>

patch -E -p1 < patch.instup.<version>

Compiling on Mac

1. Make sure you have all the prerequisites

   In addition to the previously mentioned libraries, make sure the following libraries are available:

   • libpng
   • libjpeg
   • motif/openmotif

2. Run configure telling it where to find installed packages:

   ./configure --with-extra-ldpath=/usr/local/lib --with-extra-incpath=/usr/local/include
   

   or if using homebrew and bash, you could specify

    ./configure --with-extra-ldpath=$(brew --prefix)/lib --with-extra-incpath=$(brew --prefix)/include
   

3. Edit Make.conf with a text editor. Replace -O2 with -O0

4. Compile: make -j

Improved functionality

1. Instantaneous Updating

   This patch adds instantaneous updating to the major widgets. Only the feature changed gets updated. This means that, for example, the line colour of a set is changed when you select the colour, NOT when you press apply.

   Why is this so great?

   • Well, say I have a bunch of sets for which I selected all the line styles, symbols and colours. Now I want to change the width of all of them Traditionally, this would have meant that I would have to go through and do every set individually. Now, I can select all the sets and ONLY the line width wll get changed when I select a new line width. Imagine this with graphs, axes, etc.
   • I can see the result right away. I do not have to leave the widget and hit the apply button.
   • every modern program works like this

   There is a new X resource to control this. By default it is on, but if you want the old behavior, put the following line in your ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults file:

   XMgrace*InstantUpdate: false
   

2. Independent major and minor tic directions

3. A Set Locator Fixed Point button has been added to the locater menu.

4. PDFs, JPGs and PNGs can be cropped to the minimum bounding box: use the "Tight BBox" device option from the GUI. The 3 devices now also have the options to control this, like EPS: bbox:tight bbox:page

5. Set comments can be read from a file, one per line, from Edit/Data sets.../Edit/Read set comments

6. Offsets can be applied to Titles and Subtitles to finely control vertical placement

7. Project description added to the Plot window

8. autoscale added to the set menu

9. file with legend captions can now be added on command line

10. Default print resolution for all printing devices have been bumped to 300 dpi (from 72dpi).

11. The vertical toolbar has been extended to include buttons for common operations such as: ASCII import and export, Print settings, Objects, and other data manipulation functions.

12. Pointer coordinates: under the Window menu, the new function allows the user to click over the plot to get the coordinates of the points in the external console.

13. Resized the default width of the xmgrace window (HighRes: 1200; LowRes: 1000).

14. New Library of non-linear fitting functions is now included in Debian unstable/testing and in the official version of grace in Maverick.

15. Autoticking is no longer error so the console window need not popup when you change scale.

16. The x-axis or y-axis of the current graph can be copied to all other graphs with one button click

17. When reporting on sets within a region, the sets in the region will become selected in the set appearance dialog.

Developers

A shell script is provided to create the patch file. It is called make_iu_patch. Instructions are commented inside the script.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rob Summers for catching some IU bugs.

Features from 10 onwards are made available by incorporating the patch of Nicola Ferralis feranick@hotmail.com