PGPLOT Graphics Subroutine Library

Introduction

The PGPLOT Graphics Subroutine Library is a Fortran-callable, device-independent graphics package for making simple scientific graphs. It is intended for making graphical images of publication quality with minimum effort on the part of the user. For most applications, the program can be device-independent, and the output can be directed to the appropriate device at run time. Although originally conceived as part of the Caltech VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) programs, PGPLOT has much wider applicability and is now widely used at astronomical and other scientific institutes throughout the world. Graphs produced with PGPLOT appear in almost every issue of the major astronomical journals.

There is a draft web-based manual and an html description of each of the individual subroutines is available here. The same information is available in plain text and TeX in /import/astro/software/pgplot/v5.2.0/doc. Source code (fortran) is in /import/astro/software/pgplot/v5.2.0/pgplot/src. See the PGPLOT homepage for a more general discussion of the package, a list of the operating systems for which it is available, and some interactive drawing packages that use PGPLOT.

To link with PGPLOT, you need to include the pgplot bin directory in your loader path. This is done with:

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /import/astro/software/pgplot/v5.2.0/bin_solaris2.7

This should probably go in your .cshrc. If you already have a LD_LIBRARY_PATH set there, append the above directory to the colon-separated list. Then you can compile and link your program with the command (or some equivalent):

f77 -O -o your_prog your_prog.f -lpgplot

Before running a program that uses PGPLOT, you must define the environment variable PGPLOT_DIR:

setenv PGPLOT_DIR /import/astro/software/pgplot/v5.2.0/bin_solaris2.7

Again, you probably want this in your .cshrc file. There are other environment variables the you may want to set. See the documentation for more details on linking and running.

The current library was compiled with f77 and does not work with f90 (I believe). We could create a f90 version if there is some demand for it. There are also C wrappers available for the pgplot routines. They too are not currently installed, but I could do so if there is enought interest in them (it will happen much quicker if you can tell me what I am supposed to do).

Copyright

Status

Revised February 7, 2000.