[ncl-talk] ps figure can not work

[Rick Brownrigg]

OK, that's interesting. Ultimately it would be the cairographics (libcairo)
that's responsible for drawing to the "ps" workstation. Fixing the problem
is likely to be rather tricky:

i) its hard to see how a simple kernel upgrade could have affected
anything; was it perhaps a complete Linux OS upgrade  (which would likely
install newer versions of libraries and other software)?
ii) is your NCL binary dynamically linked against cairo?  try:
    ldd `which ncl`
and look to see *if* cairo is showing up in the list, and note where it is
coming from.
iii) its also hard to imagine the cairo library would be built without PS
support -- its possible, but one has to be very deliberate. But this is all
I  can think of that might be the source of the problem. I should think NCL
would give you a meaningful error message, but...?  If cairo is dynamically
liked, you could possibly build it yourself (it requires building pixman
too), put it is a directory in your own workspace, and setting this
environment variable to force the system to look at that location first:

  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/....your-cairo-dir:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

That seems like a lot of work, and I'm not certain it would fix the problem
(maybe your sysadmin could do this)

If you can live with the oldps driver, you can set this environment
variable that will override the "ps" workstation with "oldps". Note that
oldps does not support translucent colors and is possibly limited to 256
colors (I can't recall)

   export NCARG_OLD_PS=true

Hope that helps and good luck!

Rick



On Sat, Aug 31, 2019 at 7:10 AM 朱学明 <557xiaozhu at 163.com> wrote:

> Dear Rick,
>      Thanks for your kindly answer.
>      I have tried with "oldps". It works well. In this case, how should I
> fix my "ps" case's problem, please? Do you know which library should lead
> to this problem?
>
>      Thanks.
>
> 2019-08-31
> ------------------------------
> Xueming Zhu 朱学明
> Key Laboratory of Research on Marine Hazards Forecasting (LoMF), SOA
> National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center (NMEFC)
> No.8, Dahuisi Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100081
> People's Republic of China
> Tel:+86-10-82481923
> ------------------------------
>
> *发件人：*Rick Brownrigg <brownrig at ucar.edu>
> *发送时间：*2019-08-30 11:33
> *主题：*Re: [ncl-talk] ps figure can not work
> *收件人：*"朱学明"<557xiaozhu at 163.com>
> *抄送：*"ncl-talk at ucar.edu USERS"<ncl-talk at ucar.edu>
>
> Hi,
>
> I do not have a good explanation as to why that is happening. But I wonder
> if you would try an experiment with me -- in the gsn_open_wks() statement,
> try using "oldps" instead of just "ps", and let me know happens.  "oldps"
> (an unfortunate name that I'm responsible for) refers to the legacy
> postscript driver, vs. the current default drivers based upon
> cairographics.  Postscript support is optional in cairographics, but one
> has to go to lengths to disable it. I can't think of any other explanation
> however...
>
> Rick
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 8:28 PM 朱学明 via ncl-talk <ncl-talk at ucar.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear all,
>>
>>        I am trying to use NCL V6.5.0 on the computer nodes of our
>> super-computer. It can work when I set the figure type as "png" or "pdf".
>> But it can not work with "ps". It can output a zero size file named "
>> aaa.ps", and without any error message. However, the same script can
>> work well on the login node with any figure type, "ps", "png", "pdf".
>>        Initially, it also can work well with "ps" type on the computer
>> node in May. It is side that the super-computer administrator had upgraded
>> the kernel of Linux system in June.
>>        Anybody can give me any suggestion how to fix my problem? Or which
>> software maybe changed when upgrading the Linux system, then affecting the
>> generation of the figure of "ps" type?
>>
>>       Thanks and regards.
>>
>>
>> 2019-08-30
>> ------------------------------
>> Xueming Zhu 朱学明
>> Key Laboratory of Research on Marine Hazards Forecasting (LoMF), SOA
>> National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center (NMEFC)
>> No.8, Dahuisi Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100081
>> People's Republic of China
>> Tel:+86-10-82481923
>> _______________________________________________
>> ncl-talk mailing list
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>
>
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