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In interactive mode, or when given the -V
option (the default
when running Asymptote
on a single file under MSDOS
),
Asymptote
will automatically invoke the PostScript
viewer gv
(under UNIX
) or gsview
(under
MSDOS
; available from
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/) to display
graphical output. These defaults may be overridden with the
configuration variable psviewer
.
Configuration variables are most easily set as Asymptote
variables in the configuration file (by default, .asy/config.asy
in the
user's home directory or %USERPROFILE%\.asy\config.asy
under
MSDOS
); see configuration file.
Here are the default values of several important configuration variables.
import settings; psviewer="gv"; pdfviewer="xpdf"; gs="gs"; python="";
Under MSDOS:
import settings; psviewer="c:\Program Files\Ghostgum\gsview\gsview32.exe"; pdfviewer="c:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe"; gs="c:\Program Files\gs\gs8.54\bin\gswin32c.exe"; python="c:\Python24\python.exe";
For PDF format output, the gs
setting specifies the
location of the PostScript
-to-PDF processor gs
and pdfviewer
specifies the location of the PDF
viewer. The graphical user interface may also require setting the
variable python
if Python
is installed in a nonstandard
location.
The configuration variable dir
can be used to adjust the
search path (see Search paths).
By default, Asymptote
attempts to center the figure on the
page, assuming that the paper type is letter
. The default paper
type may be changed to a4
with the configuration variable
papertype
. Alignment to other paper sizes can be obtained by setting the
configuration variables paperwidth
and paperheight
.
The following configuration variables normally do not require adjustment:
texpath dvips convert display animate xasy
Configuration variables may also be set or overwritten with a command line option:
asy -psviewer=gsview -V venn
Alternatively, system environment versions of these configuration
variables may be set in the conventional way. The corresponding
environment variable name is obtained by converting the configuration
variable name to upper case and prepending ASYMPTOTE_
:
For example, to set the environment variable
ASYMPTOTE_PSVIEWER="c:\Program Files\Ghostgum\gsview\gsview32.exe";under
Microsoft Windows XP
:
Start
button;
My Computer
;
Properties
from the popup menu;
Advanced
tab;
Environment Variables
button.
The PostScript
viewer should be capable of automatically
redrawing whenever the output file is updated. The default UNIX
PostScript
viewer gv
supports this (via a SIGHUP
signal). Upgrading to gv-3.6.2
(from
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gv/
) is required for interactive mode to
work properly.
Users of ggv
will need to enable Watch file
under
Edit/Postscript Viewer Preferences
Users of gsview
will need to enable Options/Auto Redisplay
(however, under MSDOS
it is still necessary to click on the
gsview
window; under UNIX
one must manually redisplay by
pressing the r
key).