Scientific Software Ltd, Marlow, Buckinghamshire, is aiming to give the International Standards Organisation Graphics Kernel System – GKS – standard a new lease of life with the release of a new GKS-based toolkit claimed to simplify the development of graphics in C or Fortran for scientific and technical applications. E-GUL, Engineering Graphics Utility, runs on Unix, MS-DOS and VAX/VMS systems. It enables three-dimensional data to be shown in a variety of guises without resort to the use of the three-dimensional version of GKS, or Phigs, the three-dimensional Programmers Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System. Although it is built upon Scientific Software’s S-GKS implementation of GKS, E-GUL will interface with any version of GKS, the company says. In addition Scientific Software has introduced version 2.1 of S-GKS, which, written in C, offers compatibility with the X Window System and window management environments such as OSF/Motif and AT&T’s Open Look. GKS offers high-level graphics capabilities in application areas that are unsuitable as X Window tasks, and although X Window is becoming a de facto standard in the industry, Scientific Software stresses that the two should be regarded as complementary technologies – not rivals. The firm also has business-oriented version of E-GUL, called B-GUL – Business Graphics Utility – and C-GUL, which enabapplications written for CalComp systems to be transferred to GKS. Following the adoption of a standard for the C language by ANSI, Scientific Software expects a C-based GKS standard to be ratified sometime next year.
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