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Downloading DATAPLOT for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion)

Contact Information June 2014

Alan Heckert
Statistical Engineering Division
National Institute Of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-8980
(301) 975-2899
alan.heckert@nist.gov
Jim Filliben
Statistical Engineering Division
National Institute Of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, Md. 20899-8980
(301) 975-2855
james.filliben@nist.gov

Introduction This page contains the intstructions for downloading and installing Dataplot on the OS X 10.6 and 10.7 operating systems.

The download files contain both a pre-built executable file and the source code in case you need to build from source. The pre-built executable was built on an OS X 10.6 system. However, I have also installed it on a few 10.7 systems.

Be aware that this is a "Unix/X11" port as oppossed to a "native" OS X application. There are two ways you can run Dataplot under OS X.

  1. You can run Dataplot in a traditional command line mode (this will be referred to as the command line version).

    The command line version can be run from either an X11 terminal window or a standard terminal window.

  2. Alternatively, you can run a Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI for Dataplot is written using the Tcl/Tk scripting language.

Note 1:This version (2014/06/27) will be the last version for for 10.6. I will be upgrading my Mac to 10.9 and future versions will be built on that system.

Note 2:The Dataplot executable for this version was built with version 4.2 of the gfortran/gcc compilers. If this version of the executable does not run on your system, then this is probably due to incompatabilities of the gfortran/gcc runtime libraries on your system. In this case, you need to build Dataplot from the source. This is most likely to be an issue on 10.7 and 10.8 platforms.

Prerequisites Before installing Dataplot, the following prerequisites are required.
  1. If X11 is not installed on your system, then you need to install it. It should be on your installation DVD (it is typically in the "extras" part).

  2. The gcc compiler should be installed on your system. This is required so that certain runtime libraries will be available. This is required even if you use the pre-built Dataplot executable.

    Most systems should already have gcc installed.

  3. Dataplot uses the Aquaterm library to generate screen graphics for the command line version of Dataplot when it is run from a standard terminal window. If Aquaterm is not installed on your system, download and run AquaTerm1.1.0.dmg.

    Note that the earlier version 1.0.1 of Aquaterm does not work for Snow Leopard or Lion.

  4. When you unpack the Dataplot installation file, there will be a sub-directory "lib/dataplot_auxillary_lib" that contains several libraries that you may need to copy to "/usr/local/lib". Specifically, it contains the gfortran runtime library (these start with "libgfortran"). The remaining libraries are "gd", "png", "freetype", and "jpeg". Dataplot uses the gd library to generate jpeg, gif, and png bit-map graphics files.

    I do not install these files automatically since some of you may have already installed some of these for use by other applications.

    Copy any of the these files not already in "/usr/local/lib" to "/usr/local/lib".

    If you have already installed a version of one of these libraries that is incompatible with the version used by Dataplot, you may need to build from source.

  5. Dataplot uses the Tcl/Tk scripting language to implement the GUI. The usual Tcl/Tk implementation for OS X 10.6 and 10.7 available from the Active State web site has some issues with the Dataplot GUI (specifically, some of the text in the menu buttons is truncated). For this reason, I have downloaded the source from the Tcl Developer Xchange (http://www.tcl.tk) and built Tcl/Tk from this source. This version avoids the issue of the truncated text. However, you do lose the Aqua look of the menus that the Active State version provides (it has the look of the standard Linux implementation).

    For Dataplot, I recommend that you install the version I built from source. Download the file tcltk.tar.gz to your root directory and do the following:

      cd $HOME
      gunzip tcltk.tar.gz
      tar -xvf tcltk.tar

    More long term, I plan to update the Dataplot Tcl/Tk scripts to work correctly with the Active State implementation of Tcl/Tk.

Downloading Dataplot Step 1: Select Root Directory for Dataplot Installation The first step is to select the "root" directory for the Dataplot installation. Although you can make this any directory that is convenient to you, we recommend using one of the following choices:

  • /usr/local - this is the recommended choice if you have administrator priveleges on your system.

  • /Users/name - here "name" refers to your user name on your local system. This is the recommended choice if you do not have administrator priveleges on your system. The environment variable "$HOME" should refer to this directory.

Whatever directory you choose, we will refer to this as the Dataplot root directory in the discussion below.

Step 2: Download and Unpack the Installation File The README.TXT contains a copy of the installation instructions.

The next step is to download the Dataplot installation file dataplot.snow_leopard.2014_06_27.tar.gz.

Assuming that you have downloaded or copied the installation file to the Dataplot root directory, you can unpack these files with the commands

    sudo gunzip dataplot.snow_leopard.2014_06_27.tar.gz
    sudo tar -xvf dataplot.snow_leopard.2014_06_27.tar.gz
Once the files have been unpacked, refer to the README file for the remaining installation instructions.

You also need to add the Dataplot "bin" directory to your default path. For example, if you installed the Dataplot files in "/Users/heckert" and you run the c-shell or t-shell, then you can add the line

    set path=($path /Users/heckert/bin)
to your .cshrc file. If you run the Bourne shell, then add the lines
    PATH=/Users/heckert/bin:$PATH; export PATH
to your .bashrc file.

Since many sites have special customizations for these files, we do not do this automatically. Also, this does not take effect until you reboot your system. You can enter these commands manually if you do not want to reboot.

Problems with Downloading
Installation Problems If you have problems with the installation, contact Alan Heckert for assistance.
Larger Executable
Executable with Larger Workspace Size The default version of Dataplot for this installation provides a workspace size of 500,000 rows by 10 columns (you can re-dimension to get more columns, but you cannot specify more than 500,000 rows).

You can download an executable, dataplot.snow_leopard.2014_06_27.big.gz with a workspace of 1,000,000 rows by 10 columns. After you download this file, do the following (this assumes you have put the Dataplot executable in /usr/local/bin):

    sudo gunzip dataplot.snow_leopard.2014_06_27.big.gz
    sudo cp dataplot.snow_leopard.2014_06_27.big \
    /usr/local/bin/dataplot.snow_leopard.2014_06_27

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Date created: 04/07/2012
Last updated: 06/27/2014

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