Compiling and Using plt under MS-Windows

It is possible without much trouble to compile and use plt under MS-Windows. Do not attempt to use a commercial C compiler for this purpose, however. The only C compiler that is known to work is Cygwin gcc (which is freely available from http://www.cygwin.com/ and comes accompanied by a complete set of development tools and other utilities including GNU tar, make, bash, cat, dd, rm, and tr).

• Download and install Cygwin. In the Select Packages dialog, you will see a collapsed tree view of the numerous packages available. Click the View button once so that the indicator to its right changes from ``Category'' to ``Full''. You may resize the dialog box as needed until the package names are visible. To select a package for installation, click on its rotating selector (in the New column) to cycle through the available choices until a version number appears. In most cases, you should choose the highest version number from among those that are available (this is usually the first alternative offered). Be sure to choose at least the following packages for installation:

  bc Needed by pltf for function plotting.

  gcc Needed to compile plt.

  gv Needed to preview PostScript plots

  ImageMagick Needed to make PNG plots (for use on web pages, etc.)

  make Needed to install plt.

  xorg-x11-devel Needed to make screen plots

• Download plt.tar.gz using your web browser.

• Open a Cygwin terminal emulator window (the Cygwin installation will have created a desktop icon for this) and perform the remaining steps by typing into it.

• Follow the instructions in the Linux or Unix section above for unpacking the compressed archive of plt sources (plt.tar.gz).

• Compile and install plt by typing:

make install

• To test the installation, start the X server (e.g., using startx) if it is not running already, and then (from an X terminal window) type:

make xdemo

To test the PostScript driver, try this:

make psdemo