XTHING - A Visualization Tool John L. Cwikla Materials Research Laboratory Center for Computation University of Illionois 1991 XTHING is a tool I wrote for the use of displaying 3D data in 2D. Most of the packages we had only displayed in 16 colors, I broke that barrior. XTHING takes a file of data and plots it in n-1 colors where n is the number of colors available on the display. It compresses points either linearly or logarithmically, displays the data in color (HSB) or gray scale, zooms, and does period repeats of the image. It also outputs in postscript (which post.c might be handy for a slew of programs...) I wrote XTHING on an IBM/RS6000 but have successfully compiled it with no changes on VAX VMS systems. Plus (if you have the memory) I have plotted over 800,000 points. Run the program to see what it does. Use -help for command line options. See title.h for copyright and such. Bugs: If you specify a command line option but no filename, it complains it can't find that option as a file...Oh well. Notes: It will only output PostScript in the same number of colors as you are using. If you change from Linear to Log plotting it won't recalibrate until the next file read. NOV-1990 The output for postscript file is set up to fit on a normal size printer page with a half inch margin on the left and right and a one inch margin on the top an bottom. It should be pretty easy to change it if you want. Otherwise: Go nuts, I hope it's useful. Send me comments/bugs, who knows, I might update it. (PS. I wrote this in about 2 days, so it AIN'T perfect) Have a nice day. John L. Cwikla cwikla@uimrl7.mrl.uiuc.edu ---- P.S. Note that there are some mysterious functions lying around that I have been playing with, you might want to comment them out (like the RandomizeColor function in color.c), plus there is a hidden -root option that I added just for kicks when I started playing with some fractal data... John
