paint

NAME

paint - Description of hardcopy color output system for GRASS.

INTRODUCTION

The paint system allows the user to produce color hardcopy maps of vector, raster, and sites file data at any scale. For a discussion of the GRASS paint functions, see the manual entries for p.chart, p.colors, p.icons, p.labels, p.map, and p.select.

PAINT DEVICES

The GRASS paint system supports multiple color printers using a device driver concept. The paint (p.) functions listed above send graphics requests to device-dependent paint drivers. These drivers translate the application requests into device-dependent requests to produce hardcopy maps.

INSTALLING A PAINT DRIVER

A number of paint drivers have been distributed with GRASS. The installation of a driver is a 2 step process. The first involves identifying the driver(s) which correspond to printer(s) connected to your system and compiling those drivers. The second involves telling each driver which i/o port it is to use.

The source code for the drivers lives in $GISBASE/../src/paint/Drivers (The variable GISBASE refers to the directory in which GRASS is installed on your system.)
The selection and compilation of the drivers is done when GRASS is compiled as a whole.
The port configuration is handled using the UNIX ln command.

Each driver expects to send its output to /dev/driver. For example, the tek4695 driver expects to find a tektronix 4695 (or 4696) printer on /dev/tek4695.

Suppose the printer is actually on /dev/tty10. Then, a link named /dev/tek4695 is made to /dev/tty10:

ln /dev/tty10 /dev/tek4695

NOTES

There are 2 drivers which do not use i/o ports. One is the preview driver, which sends its output to the graphics screen instead of a hardcopy printer. This driver is very handy and should definitely be compiled on your system.

The other is the null driver, which is used for debugging purposes and probably should not be compiled on your system.

If you compile either of these drivers, you shouldn't create a /dev file for them.

AUTHOR

Michael Shapiro, U.S.Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory