The MIT Voyager Plasma Science Data Display Documentation

At present, most of the data display in the Plasma Group is done either with Fortran routines (which will be discussed on this page), or with IDL.
The following describes some of the High level routines that display the voyager data, Mid Level routines that control pen motion, Low level routines that interface with specific devices, and some of the Imaging routines.

High Level Plotting Routines

High level routines are those that directly produce Voyager plots.

pltnd
pltsp
pltodd
curplt
dodp

pltnd

Plots N days (usually 25) of Voyager data per page. The default plot contains flow angles, thermal width, density and speed. This is just a short main program that calls "dodp".

This is an old stand-alone program that plots one spectrum above another. Not used much now, but can be useful for seeing changes in the details of the flow. Other options are idl with plot_spectra.pro or plot_spec_levels.pro. The latter does almost the same thing as "pltsp".

oddplt

Plots the currents in each of the cups. There are many options concerning layout, whether to plot currents, log currents, digital counts etc. Also has the ability to plot calculated currents from fit parameters, and to distinguish between points that are used in the fit and those that are not, and points that had known transmission errors. "curplt" does most of the actual plotting. Called by "outmod" , which is called by "vgranl" .

curplt

Called by oddplt

dodp

"dodp" does both the day (1 day) and the rotation (nday) plots. It is set to plot different variables, or functions of variables versus time. It is called either by "pltnd" , for rotation plots, or "outmod" which in turn is called by "vgranl" for day plots. In both cases, the plot is controlled by a namelist, that reads in controlling parameters.

Mid Level Plotting Routines

Mid level plotting routines are those routines that plot points, scale, label, but are not explicit to the Voyager data. Many of these routines are similar to the old Calcomp plotting routines. They all flow through a common interface which is non-device specific. From there, there are several packages that interface with specific devices. There is an ability to control much of the output of the ploting routines from the keyboard. The Subroutine option accepts the following input from the keyboard

?	Print out list of plot commands
c	continue
e	erase plot screen
f	save plot results into file
g	go to next screen
G	Go to next reset
h	hardcopy, obsilete
i	change line width to 1 on bXw monitors
I	change line width to 1 on printer
m	stop laser printer
n	no save file
o	start new plot at end of previous plot
p	start next plot at origin on pr4evious plot
P	reset origin every n plots
S	reset point size
t	no screen plots
s	screen plots
x	options off
q	quit
w	change window size
x	X

These are called the Low Level plotting routines.

Low Level Plotting Routines.

The Low Level Plotting routines are actually several sets of routines that interface with different devices.

xwin

Plots to X-windows

nwin

Plots to no-window , i.e. dummies out plot calls.

tek

Plots to tektronix terminal

Imaging Routines

These routines, unlike the above routines, are not plotting routines. They make color images using GIPSTOOL and can be viewed either on a color terminal or printed out on a color printer. There is only one routine currently in use, "spec" in the "im" directory, which produces the color spectrograms. There is a similar program for the imp data. Magnetic fields can also be plotted in these spectrograms. Documented in spec.ps .