There is only one compulsory edit of a file needed to configure PaPCo for a site: You need to set the directory of the main PaPCo package and of your own private site from which you run PaPCo. All other configuration can be done via user-friendly widgets.
PaPCo automatically configures itself to use whichever modules the user supplies and chooses. Adding and removing modules is simply done through a startup widget. Each such configuration can be saved, and old configurations can be loaded through the startup widget.
At start-up PaPCo sets environmental variables pointing at the location of
PaPCo, the local PAPCO_USERS directory and the modules. The location
of the data directories can be configured in each module's panel editor by
setting the correct environmental variables.
Printers can also be set-up through a printer config file which tells PaPCo the name of the printer and the associated call needed to access it. Only PostScript (normal and encapsulated) and GIF output is supported. If no printer config is found then only output to file is possible.
Several PaPCo variables are set via a defaults file which ``remember'' the last state PaPCo was in when exited. Some of these defaults are user-configurable, and aim to make the widget exportable to any kind of screen size.
We use the term ``product'' to denote a user-defined combination of panels of various data types, such as the one shown in Figure 4.1. The product is the description of the panels, i.e. how many, what they contain, in which order they appear, what sizes they should be. Such a product could be an overview plot, a summary plot or anything else that the user wants to put together.
PaPCo allows the saving and loading of such product files. The built-in batch processing capability then uses a product for a range of time intervals. The intention is that for collaboration with co-workers, the user can use the vehicle of these product files and associated batch files to exchange data relevant for a given scientific project. Since a lot of the data nowadays is made available in the form of plots on the Web, PaPCo can be used as a front end to automatically make any plot desired.