Here we shall discuss briefly some of the more common interactive output devices.
Many popular terminals or terminal emulators at present have a facility for switching between text and graphics "screens". This includes the xterm emulator under X-windows, vt100's with Retrographics, and numerous emulators for microcomputers which have a dual vt100/tek4010 emulation capability. On these devices, it is possible to switch between the text and graphics screens by surrounding your PLplot calls by calls to plgra and pltext. This will allow your diagnostic and informational code output to not interfere with your graphical output.
At present, only the xterm driver supports switching between text and graphics screens. The escape sequences as sent by the xterm driver are fairly standard, however, and have worked correctly on most other popular vt100/tek4010 emulators we've tried.
When using the xterm driver, hitting a RETURN will advance and clear the page. If indeed running from an xterm, you may resize, move, cover and uncover the window. The behavior of the X-window driver is quite different, however. First, it is much faster, as there is no tty-like handshaking going on. Second, a mouse click is used to advance and clear the page, rather than a RETURN.
On a tektronix 4014 compatible device, you may preview tektronix output files via the pltek utility. pltek will let you step through the file interactively, skipping backward or forward if desired. The help message for pltek is as follows:
% pltek
Usage: pltek filename
At the prompt, the following replies are recognized:
h,? Give this help message.
q Quit program.
<n> Go to the specified page number.
-<n> Go back <n> pages.
+<n> Go forward <n> pages.
<Return> Go to the next page.
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