Time-stamp: <1999-05-15 11:29:23 bruce>


This file describes how to install gnuplot-mode on a Windows 95 or 98
system so that you may use Gnuplot from within Emacs.

Gnuplot-mode was written by Bruce Ravel <ravel@phys.washington.edu>.
Contact him with any questions or comments regarding gnuplot-mode.
For questions or comments regarding Emacs or Gnuplot, contact the
authors of those programs.


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Gnuplot-mode and Gnuplot can be used with Emacs on a Windows 95 or 98
system, although a small amount of additional effort will be required
to get everything working.

The best solution is to install a sufficiently recent version of
Gnuplot which includes the ability to run as a child process (as of
May 15 1999 there is no such version).  A more complete description of
this is attached to the end of this document.  Recent versions of
Gnuplot can be found at ftp://ftp.gnuplot.vt.edu/pub/gnuplot/

   If you install a very recent version of gnuplot which includes the
   ability to run as a child process, then the installation
   instructions for gnuplot-mode are much simpler.  After following
   the normal installation instructions, just add the following line
   to your Emacs initialization file:

         (add-hook 'gnuplot-load-hook
                   '(lambda ()
                        (setq gnuplot-program
                              "c:/path/to/pgnuplot/pgnuplot.exe")))

   Replace "c:/path/to/pgnuplot/pgnuplot.exe" with the full path to
   pgnuplot on your computer.



You can make gnuplot work even with an older version of Gnuplot for
Windows by following these steps:

  1.  Edit the file pgnuplot.c so that the variable FULLPATH at line 5 
      is pointing at the actual location of the Gnuplot executable on
      your computer.

  2.  Using any C compiler, compile pgnuplot.c to pgnuplot.exe

  3.  Byte-compile gnuplot.el and gnuplot-gui.el as described in the
      INSTALL file in the main gnuplot-mode directory.  Make sure the
      .elc files a placed in a location where Emacs knows to look,
      i.e. in its load-path.  You can add new directories to the
      load-path by placing the following line near the top of your
      Emacs initialization file (.emacs or _emacs):

	 (setq load-path (append (list "c:/path/to/lisp/files")
				 load-path))

  4.  Add these lines to your Emacs initialization file (.emacs or
      _emacs):

         (autoload 'gnuplot-mode "gnuplot"
                   "gnuplot major mode" t)
         (autoload 'gnuplot-make-buffer "gnuplot"
                   "open a buffer in gnuplot-mode" t)
         (setq auto-mode-alist (append '(("\\.gp$" . gnuplot-mode))
                                       auto-mode-alist))
         (global-set-key [(f9)] 'gnuplot-make-buffer)
         (add-hook 'gnuplot-load-hook
                   '(lambda ()
                        (setq gnuplot-program
                              "c:/path/to/pgnuplot/pgnuplot.exe")))

      The last line is very important.  It tells Emacs to launch
      pgnuplot.exe as its subprocess rather than Gnuplot itself.  The
      first four lines are explained in the comments near the
      beginning of gnuplot.el.


   Replace "c:/path/to/pgnuplot/pgnuplot.exe" with the full path to
   pgnuplot on your computer.




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Resources:

  Emacs for Windows NT/9x:
      http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs.html

  The Gnuplot distribution site (includes Windows executables):
      ftp://ftp.gnuplot.vt.edu/pub/gnuplot/

  The gnuplot-mode homepage:
      http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/gnuplot/  

  Cygwin, Unix tools for Windows NT/9x:
      http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/


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What follows are the comments of the author of pgnuplot.c,
Hans-Bernhard Broeker, describing the function and need for this
program. 

                                                 Thu, 11 Feb 1999

   Here's the tiny program I came up with to fix the single most
   annoying problem specific to the Windows version of gnuplot: lack
   of support for piping commands into it via STDIN.

   For those who don't know the context: Windows GUI programs like
   wgnuplot do not have any access to the usual I/O channels stdin and
   stdout. So the usual method to allow gnuplot to run as a child
   application, being controlled via a command stream by another one
   (i.e. the classical 'popen("gnuplot", "w");' method), can not work
   on Windoze.

   It's implemented as a separate Win32 console application (that's a
   different kind of program, which cannot display GUI windows, but
   does have STDIN/STDOUT channels). This program will get hold of a
   running wgnuplot (or start one itself, passing on any command line
   arguments), and deliver each character it sees on its own standard
   input stream as a keypress message to the command window of
   wgnuplot.

   Effectively, this makes 'pgnuplot.exe' an almost 100% complete
   replacement of wgnuplot.exe, as far as starting the program is
   concerned, but adding the stdin capabilities. A different way of
   seeing it is as a prototype of a general application that wants to
   run wgnuplot as a child process.