Hv was developed by David Heddle at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) (formerly known as CEBAF) , a 4.0 GeV electron accelerator funded by the Department of Energy.
Hv is described in a recent article: Computers in Physics, 10, 174 (1996). It is hard to give a quick description of Hv. It is best to start with what it is not: it is not a data visualization package, it is not an graphical interface builder, and it is not a "controls" package such as Tcl/Tk.
Hv is a 55K line ANSI "C" library useful for GUI development in scientific/engineering applications, in which you need to represent physical devices (such as nuclear physics detectors) and allow the user to interact with the representations. In order to do this it must maintain world coordinates in addition to the usual screen coordinates, this makes it useful for other non-pixel based graphics such as scientific plotting and drawing maps and overlays. It has many built-in features, some of which are:
| drag and drop | integrated plotting | zooming/scrolling |
| time-step simulations | animation | pointer-tracking |
| drawing tools | postscript/eps printing | balloon help |
| on-line help | simplified fonts/colors | 3D sculptured look |
Hv is available via anonymous ftp click here for Hv. Also available is a set of postscript documentation: an Hv programming manual, a much smaller overview, and a manual for the popular scientific plotting package written in Hv: hvplot (which is included as a demo application in the Hv distribution).
Correspondence concerning Hv should be sent to heddle@cebaf.gov.
Applications written in Hv include:
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