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This is the (un-)official Wiki for PLplot. It should provide additional information to complement the PLplot documentation.

Building PLplot

Our traditional Autotools Build System (ABS) may be used to configure the PLplot build on Unix platforms (only) although it is deprecated and is no longer being maintained. We suggest using our new CMake Build System (CBS) instead which may be used to configure the PLplot build on both Unix and Windows platforms.

(Deprecated.) Building PLplot with our traditional ABS

Follow the ABS directions that are contained in the INSTALL file. We have no plans to update those ABS instructions any more.

Building PLplot with our new CBS

Our CMake Build System (CBS) has been made available as part of our development releases of PLplot starting with version 5.7.0 and is a build-system paradigm shift compared to our traditional Autotools Build System (ABS). Thus, it is important to consult the CMake documentation to get the most out of our CBS. That documentation is quite thorough but tends to be a bit scattered so we have collected what we think are the best general CMake documentation links for your convenience.

After consulting that documentation, install the appropriate package of CMake for your system platform. Note, you must use at least version 2.4.5 of CMake for your PLplot configuration.

Generic Unix instructions for our CBS

(Optional) set environment variables to help cmake find system components that are installed in non-standard locations

Here is one particular example (which must be executed before the cmake invocation discussed below).

export CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH=/home/software/autotools/install/include:/home/software/cgmlib/cd1.3
export CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/software/autotools/install/lib:/home/software/cgmlib/cd1.3
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/software/libLASi/install/lib/pkgconfig

For this particular example, CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH helps cmake to find the headers for libltdl and libcd in non-standard install locations; CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH helps cmake to find the libltdl and libcd libraries in non-standard install locations; and PKG_CONFIG_PATH helps cmake to use the pkg-config command internally to find a libLASi pkg-config module file that is installed in a non-standard location.

In general, CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH helps cmake find headers and other files that are installed in non-standard locations; CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH helps cmake find libraries that are installed in non-standard locations; and PKG_CONFIG_PATH helps pkg-config (either externally or internally from cmake) find pkg-config modules installed in non-standard locations. Finally, although not used in the specific example above, the colon-separated environment variable PATH helps cmake find executables that are installed in non-standard locations.

(Optional) set environment variables to specify the compilers and compiler flags

Here is one particular example (which must be executed before the cmake invocation discussed below).

export CC="gcc -O2"
export CXX="g   -O2"
export FC="g77 -O2"

Note a better option is to set CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to one of Debug, Release, RelWithDebInfo, or MinSizeRel. If you don't set this variable and don't set the environment variables above, then by default no compiler options (i.e., no optimization and no debugging symbols) are used for gcc-related compilers for our CBS which makes for fast builds, but slow execution.

cmake invocation

Here is one typical example.

mkdir build_dir
cd build_dir
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/my/prefix \
-DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON  \
../plplot_cmake >