Unimportant Information about KnotPlot
Most of the information on this page can be safely ignored.
But it is included here for people who may want to try something different.
Changing the control panel font
You do this with the -font
command line option.
Here is a list of the (currently) supported fonts, they should
work on most systems:
Courier Courier-Bold Courier-BoldOblique Courier-Oblique
Helvetica Helvetica-Bold Helvetica-BoldOblique Helvetica-Oblique
International Iris
NewCenturySchlbk-BoldItalic NewCenturySchlbk-Bold
NewCenturySchlbk-Italic NewCenturySchlbk-Roman
Screen Screen-Bold Symbol Space
Times-Bold Times-BoldItalic Times-Italic Times-Roman
AvantGarde-BookOblique AvantGarde-DemiOblique
AvantGarde-Book AvantGarde-Demi
Bookman-DemiItalic Bookman-LightItalic Bookman-Demi Bookman-Light
Helvetica-Narrow-BoldOblique Helvetica-Narrow-Bold
Helvetica-Narrow-Oblique Helvetica-Narrow
Palatino-Bold Palatino-Italic Palatino-Roman Palatino-BoldItalic
ZapfChancery-MediumItalic ZapfDingbats
The default font is Times-Roman.
Setting the mouse cursor
Several cursors are defined in files in the
demos directory with file name extensions '.cur'.
These are
tref.cur (a small trefoil),
fox.cur (the fox in socks),
elvis.cur (the King himself).
To set the mouse cursor, use the
cursor command, for example
cursor tref will give you the trefoil cursor.
Enter cursor 0 to get back to the default.
A program,
ppm2cur
is available to convert any
PPM file
to the format needed for cursors.
No more information is available on this subject at the moment.
Using KnotPlot as a screensaver
You have to give the full path name to haven, the command I use is:
haven /imager/local/bin/knotplot -screen -supersilent
The -supersilent disables all output from KnotPlot.
For some reason, when I run haven as part of the startup sequence
on the SGIs, KnotPlot starts executing at full blast (with no graphics)
in the background, sucking up a lot of CPU time.
Therefore I usually run haven from the command line of
a terminal window explictly.
With this method, I have no problems.
To check to make sure that things are working correctly on your system,
use the top command to see if KnotPlot is consuming any
CPU time when it shouldn't.
Neither it nor haven should be amongst the
list of processes reported by top when
the screensaver is inactive.
Which control panels are which?
KnotPlot has up to 31 control panels, only a few of which are
actually defined in the current version.
- 0 Main.
- 1 4D.
- 2 Sketch.
- 3 Miscellaneous things.
- 4 Reserved (spin).
- 5 View.
- 6 Reserved (coming soon).
- 7 Reserved.
- 8 Demos.
- 9 Tangle calculator.
- 10 Paint.
- 11 More demos.
- 12 Dynamics.
- 13 to 19 Reserved for future use.
- 20 to 30 Available for user-defined control panels.
Actually you are free to place buttons on any control panel, even
panel 0. However it might happen that future versions of KnotPlot
will have control panel object placements that conflict with yours.
If you use panels 20 to 30 instead this won't happen.
Check out the script file
basic-demos to see how the
(default) demos control panel is constructed.
Alternate spellings
You can use center for the command
centre and
color for colour.
[KnotPlot Manual],
[View Window],
[Control Panel],
[Command Window],
[Overview]
[Rob Scharein's
main WWW site],
[KnotPlot Site]