[chiplotle-discuss] Question on Virtual Plotter

[douglas repetto]

On 2/8/11 11:31 PM, Dick Eshelman wrote:
 > I have Chiplotle working on a old HP650C and have started to use Python
 > to draw some plots.  However, I have not been able to get the virtual
 > plotter to work.  In particular can someone please tell me what the
 > following means, or requires:
 >

Hi Dick,

Sorry for the confusion. We mostly develop Chiplotle on OSX and Linux, 
so we don't have a lot of testing on Windows. It's great to get error 
reports like this!


 > virtual_plotter_example_py
 > Line 7 "you must have hp2xx installed for io.view() to work", I have
 > found a reference to this in the documentation but no explanation.

hp2xx is a program that converts HPGL files to eps files, which can then 
be opened with your system's eps viewer. Rather than try to write an 
HPGL visualizer we just export the HPGL to an eps file and hope your 
system can open that with an external app (like Acrobat).

It looks like there's a Windows version of hp2xx here:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/hp2xx.htm

Can you give that a try and let us know if it works?


> I am running into an error in _open_file.py
> Line 14 "os.startfile(file_name)"
> WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified:
> '\\Documents and Settings\\Dick\\.chiplotle\\output\\tmp.eps'
> I am unable to figure out what, or where, the variable (file_name) or
> (tmp.eps) is supposed to come from.


That's because the call to hp2xx is failing, so there's no temp.eps file 
created. We should probably detect that and not bother to try to open 
the file if hp2xx doesn't work. You're not doing anything wrong here.

best,
douglas

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