Winteracter is a modern GUI toolset for the Fortran 90/95 programming language. A selection of visual development tools and a substantial subroutine library are provided. Winteracter is available for Win32 and Unix/Linux operating systems on Intel, Alpha and SPARC hardware. A broad range of Fortran 9x compilers are supported.

Winteracter offers many advantages:

• Create modern GUI based applications using the latest Fortran standard.
• GUI features based on native Windows and Motif components.
• Avoid complex mixed language programming. Winteracter is a totally Fortran based solution.
• No low level API access required.
• An extensive set of visual tools simplify the design process. Menus, dialogs, icons, cursors, buttons, toolbars and graphs can all be created using the supplied visual design aids.
• Meaningful names and simple argument lists make for highly readable and easily maintained code.

• Mature platform independent graphics and operating system interface based on our well established INTERACTER product.
• Numerous graphics hardcopy/export formats supported.
• Distribution of Winteracter-based programs is royalty-free.

Visual Tools

• WiDE - The Winteracter Development Environment

• Wizard - A Winteracter Program Generator

• DialogEd - An Interactive Dialog Editor

• GraphEd - An Interactive Graph Designer

• HelpEd - An Interactive Windows Help File Editor

• IconEd - A Icon, Cursor & Bitmap Editor

• MenuEd - An Interactive Menu Designer

• PlotConv - An Image Display, Conversion & Print Utility

• SetupEd - An Interactive Install Script Editor

• ToolEd - An Interactive ToolBar Editor

• IFD2DLG - Convert INTERACTER forms to resource scripts

X/Winteracter

X/Winteracter is a major new implementation of our Winteracter GUI toolset, designed for use with X Windows, the standard Unix/Linux windowing system. X/Winteracter is based on the Motif toolkit.

Features

X/Winteracter offers a wide range of powerful GUI capabilities to the Fortran 9x developer under X Windows, including:

• Multiple windows
• Memory bitmap manipulation & bitmap viewer windows
• Text editor windows, with optional command lines
• Event handling
• Text based menus, including floating menus
• Dialog handling, including tabbed dialogs
• Common dialogs, e.g. file selector, message box, etc.
• Full range of graphics primitives
• Presentation graphics
• Graphics hardcopy/export/import
• Display and save BMP and PCX bit image files
• Operating system interface & binary file handling
• OpenGL support (provisional)

The majority of our visual tools are included:

• WiDE : Winteracter Development Environment
• Wizard : application quick start
• DialogEd : dialog designer
• MenuEd : menu builder
• IconEd : icon editor
• GraphEd : presentation graphics designer
• PlotConv : view/print/convert graphics files
• IFD2DLG : INTERACTER form to dialog converter

A resource compiler is also supplied, enabling resource scripts defining dialogs/menus/etc. to be incorporated into X based applications in the same manner as the Win32 version.

The following were omitted from X/Winteracter 2.30 (the current version):

• Grid controls
• Toolbars
• ToolEd (visual toolbar builder)

Motif

The workalike substitute known as LessTif is also useable under most conditions, but this is unsupported. The recent decision by the Open Group to make an open source version of Motif available, means that Motif is readily accessible to all developers.

Documentation

Platforms/Compilers

• Intel/Linux and Lahey LF95
• Intel/Linux and Fujitsu Fortran 95
• Intel/Linux and Absoft Pro Fortran
• Alpha/Linux and Compaq Fortran
• Alpha/Unix and Compaq/Digital Fortran
• SPARC/Solaris and Sunsoft Fortran 90 v2

Linux versions require a version of the operating system based on glibc 2.0 or higher (e.g. Red Hat 5.2 or later).

OpenGL & Winteracter

Overview

Developed originally by Silicon Graphics Inc., OpenGL is a 2D/3D graphics library which is available on most Win32 and Unix/Linux systems. OpenGL's main strengths are in the areas of 3 dimensional visualisation and animation.

Calls to OpenGL routines in the GL and GLU libraries (v1.10) can be included in Winteracter programs. While other OpenGL interfaces exist for use from Fortran based applications, the Winteracter OpenGL interface offers some significant advantages.

• OpenGL graphics can be routed to a window, memory bitmap or dialog field. Other interfaces typically just offer output to a window.
• OpenGL images can be printed via IGrPrintImage. Other interfaces do not typically offer printing facilities.
• The full range of menu types (horizontal menu bar, toolbar and floating menus are all available). Some other interfaces only offer floating menus.
• All the other Winteracter facilities are simultaneously available, combining state of the art 3D graphics, with extensive user-interface and scientific graph plotting capabilities.

Winteracter's interface to OpenGL consists of two main components:

• A routine called WglSelect which selects a target drawing surface for OpenGL output.
• A module called OPENGL which provides a Fortran 9x interface to the various OpenGL graphics routines. The routine names are the same as the C originals. Fortran 90 data types are also defined which are directly analagous to the C equivalents. Together, these allow easy translation of C based OpenGL code to Fortran 90/95.

A Winteracter-based program therefore needs to specify USE OPENGL in each program unit which will call OpenGL. A call to WglSelect will be required to specify the target drawing surface.

Supported Platforms

Win32 programs which call OpenGL routines require the presence of two Windows system DLL's called OPENGL32.DLL and GLU32.DLL (the so-called GL and GLU libraries). These are usually located in the Windows SYSTEM or SYSTEM32 directory. These are provided under Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows 95 OSR2. Users of Windows 95 release 1 will need to download the OpenGL DLL's from Microsoft's web site.

OpenGL support in Windows is "generic". In other words, it will work on any of the systems noted above. Special "OpenGL compatible" video hardware is not required. At the time of writing, accelerated OpenGL support on most PC video hardware is patchy at best, so the generic software based interface is used on most machines. Where drivers do exist, they may only provide full-screen support (typically because they are targetted at 3D acceleration of video games). However, substantial performance benefits are possible with suitable combinations of 3D video hardware and special OpenGL-aware drivers, where available. This is a field of PC hardware design which is likely to develop rapidly in the near future.

X/Winteracter includes provisional support for OpenGL under Unix/Linux. Some X/Winteracter based OpenGL programs run correctly. However, as a consequence of the varying quality of OpenGL implementations on the target platforms, we are not yet satisfied with the reliability of this interface under X. We intend to examine this issue further, before the November 2000 update (which will be available free to all EAP purchasers).

Acknowledgements

OpenGL is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc.

The OPENGL module included with Winteracter is a derivation of f90gl, the official Fortran 90 OpenGL interface written by William F. Mitchell of the Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA. While ISS provided some minor assistance in the Win32 implementation of the f90gl interface, the credit for that interface belongs to William Mitchell. The Winteracter implementation of the OpenGL interface differs from f90gl in several ways:

• The internal Fortran/C calling interfaces have been revised to ensure their correct operation with all the Win32 Fortran 9x compilers supported by Winteracter.
• The GLUT interface has been omitted since this is not required in Winteracter based programs.
• The various separate modules in the f90gl interface have been consolidated into a single module. It is only necessary to add a single USE OPENGL statement per program unit to gain access to all the OpenGL routines and data types.
• The additional object code libraries which accompany the f90gl interface are subsumed in the WINTER.LIB Winteracter library in most implementations, thereby simplifying the linking procedure.
• Support for implementation-specific OpenGL extension routines can optionally be built into f90gl via a series of pre-processor switches. However, since this involves rebuilding the interface for each target OpenGL implementation (which in turn requires a C compiler) this support has been omitted from the Winteracter OpenGL interface.