Although most of the work with PaPCo is done through the main level widget, it is useful to keep an eye on the output generated in the IDL command window, as most routines in PaPCo report status messages to let the user know what goes on. Its also here that you see if PaPCo has crashed; the traceback messages produced by IDL are very useful in debugging.
Normally, any crash that occurs should be traceable to a user module. If you really think that a crash is due to a fault in PaPCo core routines, then copy the traceback messages on your screen to an e-mail message to that author of this document and cry for help!
Most status reports from PaPCo start with % name_of_routine: and
should fit onto one line in an 80-column window. This includes messages from
PaPCo core routines AND user modules, so please adhere to this convention in
your own modules! These status reports are simply for the information of the
user, you should never be prompted to input anything on the command line - all
input functions are done through the main widget and its sub-widgets.
Here is a sample output from a PaPCo drawing loop drawing a five panel plot.
Here we plot the data for the plot_type module demonstrating some of
the built-in PaPCo features such as simultaneous different color scales,
line-style options and the standard papco_text module. Shown also is an
overlay-annotation ``Not for publication'', constructed with the annotate
widget (Section 4.5.4). The graphics output of this loop is
shown in Figure 4.5.
Not available on-line. See postscript version of the PaPCo User's Guide or look in the PaPCo distribution under papco_XX/papco_doc/papco_sample_draw_loop.text. With the start of the plotting loop, the current state is saved first and then all the panels that have to be drawn/redrawn are erased.
For each panel that is drawn papco_draw outputs the Plot number, the
name of the module, the panel vector and orbit number (0000 if not set). The
messages from papco_autorange and papco_plot_colorspec are from
the color plotting routines which come with the PaPCo distribution in
papco_XX/papco_lib.
At the end of the drawing loop there are messages informing the user that the bitmap of the plot has been saved (used by some of ther slice functions), any annotation files that are used, and to which file the plot was written or to which printer queue it was sent. If the plot is to screen, there is no message.
The output plot from this drawing loop is shown in Figure 4.5, the product drawn is the one shown in the panel composer of the main PaPCo widget in 4.1.
