driver

Arguments

driver_name

a string, driver to be selected (case insensitive).

current_driver

a string, selected driver.

previous_driver

a string, driver previously selected.

Description

This function provides a switch between the different drivers for export or display.

Direct rendering on the screen or off-screen export without any graphical user interface. This is available in the mode scilab-adv-cli (or also called -nw)

Used without any input argument, the driver function returns the current graphics driver name.

Screen output

To display graphic into a new window instead of off-screen format. This is the default behavior of Scilab.

It is possible to use the "null" format to direct graphics to nothing.

X11 or Rec

output to the screen of the computer.

Supported vectorial formats

The selected driver can be one of the following vectorial format:

Pos or ps

output into Postscript format.

PDF

output into PDF format.

SVG

output into SVG format.

Supported bitmap formats

The selected driver can be one of the following bitmap format:

GIF

output into GIF format.

PNG

output into PNG format.

JPEG or JPG

output into JPEG format.

BMP

output into BMP format.

PPM

output into portable pixmap (PPM) format.

Remark

To redirect the graphic output to a GIF file (which will be written in the temporary directory), you can use the following example:

previous_driver = driver('GIF');
xinit(TMPDIR+'/mygiffile.gif');
plot3d();
xend();
driver(previous_driver); // Bring back the previous behavior of Scilab

For example if one has generated a sequence of GIF files named img*.gif it is possible to build an animated GIF file (named anim.gif) by

convert -delay 10  img*.gif anim.gif

See also

• xinit — open a graphics export session
• xend — close a graphics export session

History