Information At The Speed Of Sight!

The HP PEX product lets you learn about the industry standard as well as access reference information so you work quickly and easily — displaying it all on your workstation:

Figure 1-1 HP PEX Online Information System's Front Page

The on-line PEX-related documentation on your system is for the PEX 5.1v4 release; it includes information on standard PEX, as well as HP's extensions to PEX.

HP PEX Documentation: Tutorial, Reference, and Help

Loaded into the HP PEX On-Line Information System is a selected portion of Chapter 3, "Getting Started," a learning tutorial, from the PEXlib Programming Manual. This book, as well as the PEXlib Programming Reference, are published by O'Reilly &Associates — publishers widely acclaimed for their highly informative and easy-to-use books on the UNIX operating system, the X Window System, and PEX.

The HP PEX On-Line Information System is based on HP CDE Help, an application that provides this integrated, hypertext learning environment.

How to Access the HP PEX On-Line Information System

To access the HP PEX On-Line Information System, simply click on the Help Manager on the HP CDE Control Panel:
Figure 1-2 Title not available (How to Access the HP PEX On-Line Information System)
When the help window appears, scroll down unto "HP PEX" is visible. Click on the PEX Cube, then the underlined "Online Documentation" text. The PEX Online documentation will appear.

You can also bring up the on-line documentation by running the script 〈vhelp〉^[1]/bin/pexman, with no arguments, from the command-line prompt. If you want to see a particular reference page for a PEXlib function, you can also type 〈vhelp〉/bin/pexman 〈command_name〉 (note that 〈command_name〉 is case-insensitive). For example:

〈vhelp〉/bin/pexman pexinitialize Return

If you need help in understanding how to operate the help system, you will find it by clicking the left mouse button on the "Help" menu in the upper right corner of the HP CDE Help window.

The Tutorial Gets You Started...

The on-line tutorial portion of the HP PEX On-Line Information System is designed to let you learn and even practice the essential steps that PEXlib applications must take to draw pictures:

Figure 1-3 The Tutorial Lets You Practice and Experiment

The tutorial enables you to run all the examples from PEXlib Programming Manual. Code from these examples can also be copied and pasted into your own programs to speed development. Many other examples and utilities are also provided, including documentation about the new functionality released in HP PEX 5.1v4, and tutorial information on texture mapping.

Reference Information Fast...

The HP PEX On-Line Information System also provides convenient access to reference information. You can select a PEX function, a typedef, or a #define, use the keyword search, or simply click on the name of the command you need, and the reference page is displayed.

Figure 1-4 On-Line Reference Pages Feature Hyperlink Navigation

Access to Performance Hints

From the "Welcome to HP PEX!" window, select Performance Hints from the list of available options.

Performance tuning hints have been added to on-line documentation. This documentation is intended to be used by application developers who don't have access to HP support channels to tune applications independently. The purpose of this feature is to add sufficient detail, and make it accessible to customers so that they can tune applications themselves.

How to Run Examples and Demos

The on-line system enables you to run the examples from the PEXlib Programming Manual. From the topic entitled "Getting Started with PEX" (under "PEX Tutorial"), click on the underlined hypertext link at the bottom of the page to run PEX programs: "(Click here to run PEX programs)." You are presented with a list of the example programs from Chapter 3 of the PEXlib Programming Manual:

Figure 1-5 Easily Experiment with Programs

This enables you to experiment with the programs; running and editing them to see the effect of settings as you change them and revert the programs to their original state — all without having to manually copy the programs and recompile them.

These examples can also be copied and pasted (used as utilities) in your own PEXlib programs to speed development. Many other examples are also available in the 〈pex〉 directory^[2] to use as a source of utilities from HP.

Similarly, there are texture-mapping programs that you can edit and run. You can find these in the "Texture Mapping Tutorial."

How to Print HP PEX Images

Hardcopy printing of HP PEX images is supported via screenpr(1).

The screenpr command supports all the visuals and colormaps used by PEX on the supported HP graphics devices, with a variety of colormap setups including both PEXColorSpace and PEXColorRange.

How to Access PEXlib 5.2 Standard Specification Draft on the World Wide Web (WWW)

The PEXlib 5.2 specification is available on the World Wide Web. The URL is http://www.x.org/pexlib/PEXlib52main.nographx.html.

The HTML version of the PEXlib 5.2 draft may be out of date with the newest working document. The latest document can be accessed from the X Consortium FTP site at ftp://ftp.X.org.

Note that current HP PEX releases do not implement the PEXlib 5.2 specification. Instead, the current revisions of HP PEX implement the PEXlib 5.1 specification with some of the PEXlib 5.2 features and other extensions.

^[1]The actual pathname of this directory depends on the file system structure. See the Graphics Administration Guide for details.

^[2]The actual pathname of this directory depends on the file system structure. See the Graphics Administration Guide for details.

Information At The Speed Of Sight!

Technical documentation

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