1 Introduction
The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado has, for many years, distributed a
extensive suite of high level graphics utilities. When NCAR converted these utilities to run over the
ISO standard GKS, Starlink was used as a test site. Starlink was subsequently given permission to
release the NCAR utilities as part of the Starlink Software Collection. The NCAR utilities offer
an alternative high level graphics package to PGPLOT (SUN/15) for use within Starlink
applications. The NCAR package is arguably more powerful than PGPLOT in functionality
and flexibility, but it does require a little more time to master. Starlink provides a set of
extensions to the NCAR graphics utilities, SNX (SUN/90), to make the use of NCAR more
accessible to the beginner. For lower level work, SGS (SUN/85) or GKS (SUN/83) should be
used.
The utilities provided by NCAR are:
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AUTOGRAPH
- — Draws and annotates curves or families of curves.
-
CONRAN
- — Contours irregularly spaced data labelling the contour lines.
-
CONRAQ
- — Like CONRAN, but faster because it has no labelling capability.
-
CONRAS
- — Like CONRAN, but slower because lines are smoothed and crowded
lines are removed.
-
CONREC
- — Contours two dimensional arrays, labelling the contour lines.
-
CONRECQCK
- — Like CONREC, but faster because it has no labelling capability.
-
CONRECSUPR
- — Like CONREC, but slower because lines are smoothed and
crowded lines are removed.
-
DASHCHAR
- — Software dashed line package with labelling capability.
-
DASHLINE
- — Like DASHCHAR, but faster because it has no labelling capability.
-
DASHSMTH
- — Like DASHCHAR, but slower because lines are smoothed.
-
DASHSUPR
- — Like DASHCHAR, but slower because lines are smoothed and
crowded lines are removed.
-
EZMAP
- — Plots continental and/or national and US state boundaries in one of
nine map projections.
-
GRIDAL
- — Package for drawing graph paper, axis, etc.
-
HAFTON
- — Draws halftone (greyscale) picture from a two dimensional array.
(N.B. The GKS cell array function GCA should be used on devices with a true
greyscale capability.)
-
HSTGRM
- — Plots histograms.
-
ISOSRF
- — Plots iso-values surfaces (with hidden lines removed) from a three
dimensional array.
-
ISOSRFHR
- — Plots iso-values surfaces (with hidden lines removed) from a high
resolution three dimensional array.
-
PWRITX
- — Plots high quality software characters.
-
PWRITY
- — Plots simple software characters.
-
PWRZI
- — Draws characters in three-space, for use with the ISOSRF utility.
-
PWRZS
- — Draws characters in three-space, for use with the SRFACE utility.
-
PWRZT
- — Draws characters in three-space, for use with the THREED utility.
-
SRFACE
- — Plots a three dimensional display of a surface (with hidden lines
removed) from a two dimensional array.
-
STRMLN
- — Plots a representation of a vector flow of any field for which planar
vector components are given on a regular rectangular lattice.
-
THREED
- — Provides a three space line drawing capability.
-
VELVCT
- — Draws a two dimensional velocity field by drawing arrows from the
data locations.
The NCAR graphics utilities are released exactly as supplied by NCAR except that the default
behaviour of AUTOGRAPH and HSTGRM has been changed to not clear the screen after each plot —
this is more appropriate for an interactive environment.
Because of a name conflict with a Fortran run-time library routine on UNIX, the NCAR routine
FLUSH has been removed from the UNIX release of the NCAR library. In order to get the same
behaviour as a call to FLUSH when using NCAR, the call
may be used (see the SPPS description in the NCAR manual).