Re: gEDA-user: Printer plots for SPICE

[John Coppens <john@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005 15:19:38 -0500
"Harold D. Skank" <skank54@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> People,
> 
> I'm running ngspice, and I'm in a situation where printout of the "plot
> screen" that I can call up during execution would be enormously helpful.
> The screen message when you "click" on "hardcopy" indicates that you
> should be able to use either Unix plot or lpr -g.  The Unix plot command
> apparently isn't installed on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise 3) and the lpr
> command gives an error message "document format not supported."  The lpr
> command apparently has been modified to be compatible with CUPS.

Those tools seem way old - I just today had the same problem. The
solution I found was to install the GNU plot utilities ('plotutils'),
which, among several others, provide a utility called 'plot'.

When you click on 'hardcopy' in the graph, it generates a file in /tmp
which can be 'plot'ted into a postscript/png/etc file with these
utilities. The name of the file generated is shown in the terminal window
where you are running ngspice.

I recommend postscript - the PNG and other formats are not anti-aliased
and are not too nice. Maybe there's a trick to it, I haven't found it yet.

Hope this helps.

John