The Weather Forecasting Forum

Jeff,


I have not been able to save grahpics. I have tried the example found in the manual several times with no luck. I get a message that the file name I entered for the name of the saved graphic is not found.

Thank you for your help in advance,

Kevin

Kevin,

I'll look into this.

Jeff

Kevin,

I forgot to add this info to the PCGRIDDS32-Beta 12-05-2004 Release Notes but the SAVE & REST commands now work properly. Give it a try!

Jeff

Jeff,


Thank you for restoring the ability to save graphics and for the printing fix for Windows XP. I do greatly appreciate your efforts.

I do have one question though. How is your work on color filling contours going? I really would like to see this happen.

Keep up the great work!

Kevin

Kevin,

Color fill contouring...well...hit a bit of a road block. I've got the basics down & working but the details are killing the whole thing. Let me explain: the contouring routine within PCGRIDDS/PCGRIDDS32 is basicly this: the program searches through the data array and makes a path "connecting the dots" through the data for a particular value. Once that path is found, it draws a line along that path. The program loops through the data from the minimum value to the maximum value, incrimenting to the next value at whatever the contour interval is set. Now, the color fill routine says that once a line is drawn, fill the side of the lesser value with a particular color and as long as the lines stay away from the corners or away from the edges, it works great. However, when a contour line starts converging tward a corner or dodging in and out along the edge of the screen, there is where problems creep in. Either the area of the screen does not get filled or, worse, the opposite side of the line gets filled which means the rest of the screen gets filled and that area is usually the parts of the screen which were already properly shaded in. There werer also problems when the contours did not go to the edge of the screen but the color shader always goes to the edge of the screen and that would not work at all.

Color shading works much better when shading polygon shapes since they are completely closed and for it to work properly on PCGRIDDS32, the contour routine whould have to be re-engineered to draw contours in a polygon-type style and I'm not up to that kind of work just yet

Color shading contours is not a dead issue. I'm just waiting for an epiphany(sp?) on how to deal with the details I've seen and take into account of every potential issue which may occur.

I'm glad you like what I've done so far.
Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I'll keep you in my prayers and hope you have that revelation soon!

In the mean time I have another question/request.

Would it be possible to change some of the default colors or add colors to the default palatte. Have 32 colors insted of the 16 we have now. Or, give the user the ability to customize colors? The reason I ask this is that some of the default colors like yellow and light green (among others) don't show up all that well on a white background and it would be nice to open up the color spectrum in the palette a little bit more.

Kevin

Kevin,

Sorry...for now, the color selection is hard-coded. I'l make a note to look into that.

On color-filled contouring, it may have a brighter future. I came across a graphics library called DISLIN which stands for Device-Independent Software LINdau (it's from Germany). It has an exstensive graphics library for ploting, contouring (2-D & 3-D), color-filled contours, etc. I'm looking into what it would take to integrate it into PCGRIDDS32.

Thanks,
Jeff

ALL,

My humble appologies but the SAVE and REST commands may not be as fixed as I thought. PCGRIDDS32 is still saving the screen as a bitmap image file instead of a series of commands to redraw it if needed...which is how it is supposed to be. I have come across a probelm or two associated with isentropic calculations so all this will be rolled into another Beta update in the near future.

Merry Christmas!
Jeff