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654. NADIR92: A Device-Independent Graphics Platform
by Simon K. Kearsley, Molecular Systems, Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, New Jersey 07065 and Keith E. Laidig, Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195 The introduction to the original NADIR graphics platform began: This set of subroutines allows one to use several graphics devices; terminals, plotters and printers. NADIR was conceived to get the job done. It professes only to draw a line. This is just as true with this latest incarnation, NADIR92. The four basic features of the platform are: Windowing onto specifically allocated portions of the graphics device. The window is associated with its own units (virtual units) and by default the plot is clipped if lines are drawn outside this window. Seasoned users of this feature can take advantage of distortion effects. 21 software fonts are available within NADIR92 (acquired from GCS - the graphics compatibility system). Simplicity. No advantage is taken of enhanced graphics attributes peculiar to each device, only those features common to all devices. Adroit programmers can easily modify and augment NADIR92 routines to suit their purposes. Transferability. Application code written with NADIR92 can be used on all devices by re-linking with the appropriate libraries. Additional drivers can be written if equivalent device- dependent subroutines are constructed. The original concept was to overcome the large inertial barrier to writing graphics programs by reducing the daunting number of device dependencies. NADIR was written to create a simple, common graphical language for a large number of devices. Consequently, NADIR takes no advantage of the special facilities available from specific devices, only those which are common to all. The platform may be readily modified to take advantage of specific features or devices, but then this is not the nadir. Lines of Code: 4200 FORTRAN 77 (UNIX) |