GraceTMPL Index Page

0.3.2

Introduction

XmGrace is a very powerful tool to produce 2D-Plots of your data. However, though there is also support for running grace in batch mode there is a certain lack in support for automation. When it comes to producing a presentation of your data on many sheets and your preferred formatting of the data should change sometime in the process, you could easily be confronted with a bunch of work doing the necessary changes.

The GraceTMPL classes provide an easy way to use existing grace-files as a template to format any number of graphs in a predefined way and save them as grace-files. This way you can apply the same graphical appearance to all of your data. In case your preferences change, you just alter the template and reformat your complete set of data within the shortest amount of time.

The capabilities of GraceTMPL include:

• The application using the GraceTMPL classes can define environment variables for the sheet, each graph and each dataset. The variables can be used in the template for dynamic string replacement. Even output filenames can be templated using variable substitution.
• Datasets in the template file can be marked to be included in the destination files for easy reference.
• Datasets can be tagged with arbitrary information strings to be interpreted by the application using GraceTMPL. This way information can be passed to the application on how to create the datasets and what kind of information is intended by the template author.
• In case no template file is loaded by the application, GraceTMPL::Save will output plain sets of data tables which can easily be imported by XmGrace or other applications.

See the 'screenshot' below for a first introduction to some of the features and section Examples and tests for more.

Project admins:

Andy Thaller <gandy at users.sourceforge.net>
Andi Brodschelm <brodschelm at users.sourceforge.net>

Screenshot

The image below shows an example template and the file produced using this template.

html demo-template-small.jpg

html demo-output-small.jpg

Note, that the appearance of the graphs hasn't changed a bit, whereas the data and the variables have been exchanged by the application. On another page you can see some annotations to the template.

See the Examples and tests section to see more before/after images.

Downloads

• Downloads are available on the Sourceforge Download Page.

• Anonymous CVS is also available: To be on the burning edge of GraceTMPL development, the CVS repository can be checked out through anonymous (pserver) CVS with the following instruction set. When prompted for a password for anonymous, simply press the Enter key.

  cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gracetmpl.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gracetmpl login
  cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gracetmpl.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gracetmpl co gracetmpl
  

  Please keep in mind that compilation of a CVS version might fail. Bugfixes are welcome anytime :-)

• Last night's CVS tarball can be found here.

Documentation

You are already viewing the automatically generated docs for GraceTMPL. However, there are some special pages we would like to refer to for convenience's sake:

• Visit the Sourceforge Project Page on http://sourceforge.net/projects/gracetmpl/
• View the Changelog to see what's happening.
• Check the Installation notes.
• The page about Examples and tests gives you a nice graphical summary of template capabilities.
• When designing a template, you might find The Template Knowledge Base useful.

News

• Anytime soon
  New Release 0.x.y
  

• 24-Sep-2004
  New Release 0.3.2
  No autoscaling on hidden datasets Python wrapper adapted to numarray API

• 11-Oct-2002
  New Release 0.3.0
  Homepage on SourceForge now created w/ doxygen
  Python wrapper included. Some new features and bugfixes

• 23-Sep-2002
  New Release 0.2.0
  New design of the homepage on SourceForge and even some 'screenshots'.
  

• 16-Aug-2001
  First Release 0.1.0
  

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