20031205: EMEP and IDV

Heiko-

Just to follow up on Stu's note.

Stuart Wier wrote:
> I am delighted with your continued interest and support for use of the
> IDV.
>
> The IDV is an important part of the future of Unidata and I hope the IDV
> is used in EMEP since actual use by projects such as yours are a
> valuable guide to IDV development.

I agree completely with Stu's sentiments.

> I am leaving Unidata this month.  IDV questions will be handled by Don
> Murray, head of IDV development.  Please send email questions to him at
> address@hidden. I will send a copy of this email to him.

This is the best way to get support.  If I am not here someone else
will handle your questions.  I've answered some of your questions
below.

> > after a long summer with a revision of our model, I am again working
> > with IDV and trying to convince our co-workers to use IDV, too.
> >
> > The newest version 1.1b2 seems to fix some problems in particular on the
> > Linux platform. The display of gridded data became very nice. I'm still
> > missing the 3D view features under linux, so they exist under windows.

Could you bring me up to speed on this issue?  If you open the dialog
at the Edit->Resources->User Preferences menu, under the "Map Display"
tab, does is the "Use 3D Display if possible" checkbox checked?  If not,
check it, then restart the IDV to see if this solves the problem.

Additionally, are you building the IDV from scratch, using the
WebStart version, or using the InstallAnywhere installer?

> > After browsing the jar-file, I found out how to add additional stations
> > in a userstations.xml file, so I've been able to add all EMEP stations.

Sorry our documentation on this is not better.  We'll be working on
this.

> > Is there a possibility to distribute the stations without explaining
> > everybody, that they have to copy the userstations.xml file to .metapps?

The IDV supports having a site (EMEP) define it's own set of
resources (stations, colortables, etc) through the
"sitepath" feature.  You can set the sitepath on the command line
(-sitepath <location of files>) before starting the IDV, or
you can set it in the User Preferences dialog.  When set from
the command line, it will use this location from them.

On that sitepath, you could put a resource bundle for the IDV
(rbi) that would point to your stations.

So, for your stations, you could create an idv.rbi that would be:

<resourcebundle  name="Default">

<!-- The list of station table xml files -->
  <resources name="application.resource.locations">
    <resource location="%SITEPATH%/emepstations.xml"/>
  </resources>

</resourcebundle>

Put this and the emepstations.xml (change the file name from
userstations.xml or change the name in the rbi file) in a publicly
accessible location (disk file or web address).  You can
add in as many different station tables as you want.  Right now,
they are in addition to the set that is sent with the IDV, but
they do show up at the top of the list.

You only have to supply the -sitepath from the command line once.
If you are using WebStart, then let me know.

> >  When plotting the names of the stations, I recognized, that the
> > umlauts don't get plotted. I attach my userstations.xml, so you can
> > verify it.

The default font for the stations only handles straight ASCII characters.
We have been wanting to use other fonts that support umlauts and such,
and plan to bubble this up to the stationlocation control.  I'll
use your file to test if this will work or not.

> > When loading the stations after loading the color-shaded plan view, the
> > stations are hidden behind the data. Is there a possibility to change
> > the order of the displayed items?

Right now, it is based on the order of addition to the display. We
are looking at how we can layer these items, but don't have a quick
solution.

> > IDV is now very feature rich and allows us to see about any aspect of
> > our data we wish, in particular in combination with the jython
> > interface, which I'm starting to use more and more. Since we need to
> > write reports and articles, we would like create plots for those with
> > IDV. The jpg-export is a first step towards this. We can add titles
> > later, but it is extremely hard to add the correct color-labels. I know
> > that this hasn't been the primary approach of IDV but it would be very
> > helpful for us to have the labels included into the plots. If this will
> > be a task I have to do by myself, are the javadocs for IDV available?
> > They might be useful for the jython interface, too.

Are you looking for just the color bar, or for the parameter name
also?  I've been working off and on on adding the color bar to the
display, but have not yet attacked the text label.  I hope to
have the color bar by the next release (sometime early January).

Thanks again for your interest and feedback in the IDV. Please
let me know if the solutions above do not work for you or if
you have further questions.

Don
*************************************************************
Don Murray                               UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                        P.O. Box 3000
(303) 497-8628                              Boulder, CO 80307
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/donm
"There's someone in my head, but it's not me"    Roger Waters
*************************************************************