Quick Start Guide welcome

Welcome to the NCAR Graphics 4.1 Quick Start Guide. This document is designed to help users who have a general understanding of how the software works and who want to begin coding their own applications using examples that are bundled with the software as a template for their own programs. This document introduces the NCAR Graphics 4.1 examples and provides links to the source code, graphic output, and descriptions of each of the examples. This document also provides access to the documentation for the traditional interface (Low Level Utilities) and detailed descriptions of their use.

This interactive document is organized according to the functionality of the visualization software. The examples are grouped into sets that produce plots of a similar type. Some of the examples are written using High Level Utilities, some are written using the NCAR Command Language, some are written using both, and some examples make calls to the Low Level Utilities.

A typical module shows:

A title that describes the purpose of the example
A sample image produced by the example
A brief discussion about the example
Links to the example's source code and resource files
Information about the example's data
An explanation of how to produce the example

To access the modules, link to the "Pick a utility" module and scan the graphics shown there until you find one that appears to be closest to the type of plot you want to create. Click on that graphic to move to the module that shows more examples of that type. Then pick the example that is closest to the type of plot you want to create. For a list of all the NCAR Graphics 4.x examples and pointers to their source codes, see the Table of NCAR Graphics examples in this release.

Alternatively, you can use the ng4ex utility to view and run the NCAR Graphics 4.1 examples, or the ncargex utility to run the LLU examples. These utilities will copy the example source code to your local directory, compile the code, and automatically run the example.

A note on the example datasets

The external datasets that are used in the NCAR Graphics 4.1 examples are located in your NCAR Graphics data directory. The pathname to this directory is available by typing "ncargpath data" at your shell prompt. This command will return the pathname of the directory where the example datasets are located. This directory is subdivided into other directories that contain different types of data files.

   Directory   |  Data
     Name      |  Type
  -------------------------
    asc        |  ASCII
    bin        |  Binary
    cdf        |  NetCDF
    grb        |  GRIB
    hdf        |  HDF

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$Revision: 1.8 $ $Date: 1998/06/16 14:42:53 $