Re: Writing PDF files

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Bill Findlay <yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk> writes:

> Thanks to everyone who has offered help with this.
>
> KDF9 is a historic British computer from 50 years ago:
>
>    <http://www.findlayw.plus.com/KDF9>
>
> I have written a KDF9 emulator in Ada 2005 that runs on MacOS X, Linux and
> Windows, and am now hoping to complete the set of KDF9 I/O devices it
> supports.  At option a Calcomp graph plotter could be fitted in place of a
> tape punch.  It interpreted 6-bit commands that directed it to move one step
> left/right and/or back/forward, with the pen raised or lowered.  That's it.
>
> All I need is the ability to create a line drawing specified by a series of
> such commands, so very basic vector drawing.  It would be good if users
> could see the plot immediately on completion, just by opening the plot file.
>
> PDF would seem to offer this convenience.  Thanks for the pointers to other
> formats that might do the job.  I'm not going to plunge into powerful
> graphics frameworks, partly to preserve portability and ease of building,
> and partly because life is too short; but some of the other suggestions
> might meet my needs.  Time to put my thinking cap on!

I see no one has suggested plplot.

I'm looking at it with Jerry from the POV of debugging on Mac OS X, and
just built the first example; the plotting options as installed here are

 < 1> xwin       X-Window (Xlib)
 < 2> tk         Tcl/TK Window
 < 3> ps         PostScript File (monochrome)
 < 4> psc        PostScript File (color)
 < 5> xfig       Fig file
 < 6> null       Null device
 < 7> tkwin      New tk driver
 < 8> mem        User-supplied memory device
 < 9> aqt        AquaTerm (Mac OS X)
 <10> svg        Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG 1.1)

and at first glance 1, 9 and 10 certainly work, 2 and 7 don't
AFAICT. Note 9!

On the other hand, I don't know whether plplot works on Windows ..