2.6 Changes to Version 8.0

Release date: 05 Feb 1998

Version 7.0 was an intermediate version to be used at the PaPCo workshop held at Los Alamos Jan 13-14 1998, and never officially released.

Version 8.0 takes account of a lot of the suggestions made at the workshop and further fixes many smaller problems. A lot of headaches were caused by trying to make PaPCo run under IDL 5.x, as some of the widget management had changed.

1.

Establishment of PaPCo Rules of the road, guidelines for PaPCo participation, and guidelines for PaPCo module Authors. The PaPCo home page has been extensively updated, please make sure you visit it.

2.

PaPCo core has been made to run under both IDL Versions 4.x and 5.x. This included:

(a)

Inclusion of a new set of routines in PaPCo core under papco_XX\papco: papco_idlver.pro. Analogous to the way system dependencies were handled in papco_opsys pro, here calls to IDL widget routines are replaced by PaPCo calls.

(b)

Parts of the PaPCo main widget have been redesigned to make sure they behave the same under both IDL versions (see below).

3.

The automated PaPCo startup procedure has been further refined and made portable to VMS and WINDOWS95. Some limited testing has now been done to check the basic operation of PaPCo core and PaPCo utility modules (plot_type, text and event) under VMS and WINDOWS95.

4.

Redesign of PaPCo main widget:

(a)

A ``top'' part for module buttons has been added.

(b)

A ``bottom'' part for action buttons has been added with extra buttons for future development.

(c)

The ``middle'' part has become smaller, but the panel editor list is now scrollable.

(d)

the ``Print'' button functionality has been split up into a ``Print Action'' button that sets the behavior of the ``Print'' action button. Output labels have been added that report the currently set printers and printer file names.

(e)

The zoom time windows are now editable and allow the user to set exact zoom times. Checking has been added to always assure that zoom start time is less than zoom end time.

(f)

Mouse action information widget has been changed from text to label as it is not editable.

5.

Distribution changes:

(a)

Apart from providing the distribution as variously compressed tar files, a straight zipped version is also supplied. Using the unzip utility both on VMS and WINDOWS95 allows unpacking of the distribution into the correct directory structure on those platforms.

(b)

The html version of this manual is also available from the PaPCo download site in various zipped and compressed tar formats.

6.

Change to Plot Style Group for panel editors. The default color chosen here used to be black - which causes problems if you've chosen your background color as black. There is now one more color in addition to the 16 predefined colors available, which is the new default: The foreground color. This foreground color is set in the papco defaults widget.