Actions Associated with the Mouse Buttons

There are several mouse menu buttons along the top of the plot window. The action of these buttons is as follows. Starting at the left top there are four buttons labelled 'draw', 'sopt', 'slib' and 'keyw'. These activate drop down menus which allow a function to be selected and inserted into the text. The 'draw' functions are a suite of drawing routines which cause lines, arcs, text etc. to be drawn to the page. The 'sopt' menu is a list of textual names for numerical constants which are used in conjunction with the set(); command to change attributes of the current graphics state such as the current colour, line width, line style, axes type, etc. Choosing set from the list of drawing functions automatically opens a menu with only an appropriate subset of these and is the recommended approach. The 'slib' button allows selection of a standard C library function. Most of these are math functions such as sin() and will not be required for making ordinary plots. They are however useful for manipulating data before plotting or generating data mathematically all from within Splot. The last button of this group 'keyw' opens a list of C keywords for selection. The only one of these that is of interest for ordinary plots is 'main'. Every file that generates a plot or drawing must start with

#include <splot.h>
main
   {
   /* list of drawing commands go here between the braces on as many */
   /* lines as necessary */
   }

This is all automatically inserted in the text by selecting 'main'. The remaining keywords in this list are only of interest when constructing loops or branches. Note that the actual text inserted for the draw, slib and keyw menu choices can be customized by editing the corresponding macros in the splot.cfg startup file.

The next set of menu buttons along the top are concerned with displaying the drawing. The default size of the drawing is one which fits on a standard 8 x 11 inch piece of paper if printed. However, as the screen resolution is not as good as that of printers it is possible to zoom in on part of a drawing in order to get a better view.