You might recall a posting I made a while back (~21Sep90) about a program
(actually two) called PAWS and PAWSDisp. Ken Mighell's PAWS is a programmable
terminal emulator that runs on the Amiga, that has VT100/Tek4010/Image-Display
screens all available simultaneously. PAWS allows you to display images from
your mainframe with a minimum of fuss, just by sending the image a line at a
time over the serial line to the Amiga, which decompresses it and draws it.
This works very well, and is quite fast. (note, serial line!)
 
I've written a Fortran subroutine (called PAWSDisp) that will accept a 2D array
of numbers (on the mainframe) and displays it (on the Amiga), using PAWS. All
that a user needs to provide is a main program (I have used Fortran and C) that
reads in your data, model, image, whatever into a 2D array, and calls my
subroutine. This 'header' to PAWSDisp is usually quite trivial to write, given a
particular format. PAWSDisp provides you with several options in terms of
scaling, zooming, trimming, PostScript output, plots of slices, plots of
histograms, etc. I have ported PAWSDisp to VAXes (with VMS) and Suns/SPARCS
(Unix, or, more strictly, SunOS).
 
If you want to animate several frames, this can be QEDone by using PAWSDisp
together with a screengrabber, like GRABBitt, which saves the screen as an IFF
frame. Load the various frames into something like DPaint III, and voila,
animations and IFF manipulations (albeit with 32 colours.. which is enough for
a lot of things, but not for everybody, granted)
 
A point to note: PAWS/PAWSDisp runs over a serial line/modem. You can quite
happily do this at home/in the office with no Ethernet requirement !
 
[In the PAWSDisp readme, you'll see that HDF format is something I do want to
support - I collect header programmes as I/someone-else write(s) them. At this
stage I only have astronomical stuff, like IRAF,FIGARO,Starlink,FITS..]
 
If you're interested in trying this out, the following is from the
release message:
 
- begin included stuff ----------------------------
 
[...]
PAWSDisp 1.40 : 18 September 1990 - Markus Buchhorn
 
[list of features deleted]
 
So, where do I get it ?
=======================
Anonymous ftp from merlin.anu.oz.au [130.56.4.215] in the directory
pub/PAWS_Sun or pub/PAWS_Vax
 
There is also a header program for IRAF images in the PAWS_Sun directory.
Others are available - mail me if you want them, or need help writing your own.
 
Please remember that we are GMT+10hrs here at the moment - keep your ftp'ing
to a quiet time of our day please, if possible.
 
- end include --------------------------
 
Sorry about the length of this posting, but I do have several vested interests
here :-), not just as someone flogging a (*free*) product. I would like to see
lots more scientific programs for the Amiga, E. Boily's stuff for example
sounds great !
 
Plotting programmes, 2d and 3D, with the ability to rotate 3D displays with the
mouse, would be my first and major requirement. PAWS/PAWSDisp covers most of
the rest for me (for now) :-)
 
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 Markus Buchhorn                                           ///  | This space
 Mt Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories, Canberra     ///   |
 PMB Weston Ck. P.O. A.C.T. 2611, Australia           \\\///    | intentionally
 markus@mso.anu.oz.au  -or-  nssdca::psi%mssso::markus \XX/     | left blank
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