Is there any way to get live preview of plots from Owl_plplot?

Learning
1

When I call plot from Owl_plplot I get a list of options:

utop # Plot.plot x y;;

Plotting Options:
 < 1> ps         PostScript File (monochrome)
 < 2> psc        PostScript File (color)
 < 3> xfig       Xfig file
 < 4> null       Null device
 < 5> mem        User-supplied memory device
 < 6> svg        Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG 1.1)
 < 7> pdfcairo   Cairo PDF Driver
 < 8> epscairo   Cairo EPS Driver
 < 9> pscairo    Cairo PS Driver
 <10> svgcairo   Cairo SVG Driver
 <11> pngcairo   Cairo PNG Driver
 <12> memcairo   Cairo memory driver
 <13> extcairo   Cairo external context driver

I haven’t tried them all.

<11> pngcairo Cairo PNG Driver works, but it’s what I’m trying to avoid.

I was hoping one of these would pop up a graphical window to instantly view the plot?

<12> memcairo Cairo memory driver crashed with:

*** PLPLOT ERROR, IMMEDIATE EXIT ***
Must call plsmem first to set user plotting area!
Program aborted

Different library Oplot (oplot.Oplot) looks like what I want, but was not able to install its dependency ocamlsdl-0.9.1 which seems some ancient dead lib on sourceforge.

(I’d be fine using another lib if Owl doesn’t do this and another exists)

2

it is indeed old, but in principle quite stable. It requires the (old) SDL1.2 library. Do you have it on your system? (for instance libsdl1.2-dev on ubuntu)

3

I am on macos

I have:

brew info sdl
Warning: Use sdl12-compat instead of deprecated sdl
==> sdl12-compat: stable 1.2.60 (bottled), HEAD
SDL 1.2 compatibility layer that uses SDL 2.0 behind the scenes

brew info sdl12-compat
==> sdl12-compat: stable 1.2.60 (bottled), HEAD
SDL 1.2 compatibility layer that uses SDL 2.0 behind the scenes

opam install ocamlsdl gives:

# checking for sdl-config... /opt/homebrew/bin/sdl-config
# checking for SDL - version >= 1.2.0... no
# *** Could not run SDL test program, checking why...
# *** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the
# *** exact error that occured. This usually means SDL was incorrectly installed
# *** or that you have moved SDL since it was installed. In the latter case, you
# *** may want to edit the sdl-config script: /opt/homebrew/bin/sdl-config
# configure: error: *** SDL version 1.2.0 not found!

/opt/homebrew/bin/sdl-config script exists

I can’t find the config.log file mentioned

4

mmm, so now there is sdl12-compat instead of the original sdl12, maybe this is the cause… I can’t test on macos though

5

Maybe that’s good occasion to convert oplot to sdl2

1 Like
6

Done!
version 0.6 (github) now uses SDL2 (via tsdl)

1 Like
7

Nice, I’ll give it a try!