Previewing Waveforms Before Printing

After spending many hours on a design, you finally manage to get it to produce the output you want. The simulated waveforms on your screen look great, so you send it off to the printer.

You pick up the printout, expecting to see something like this:

but instead, the waveform transitions are packed too close together, causing the values to be printed as a bunch of useless -'s.

Too avoid wasting 5 cents on a bad hard copy, it may be worth your while to preview the output. Doing this involves printing to a file instead of directly to the printer. In CEB 531 and 540, printing to a file will generate a postscript file, since the default printers are postscript printers. You can then view the file with a program such as ghostview. If it looks OK, then go ahead and print to paper. Otherwise, you'll have to go back and adjust your print options. Maybe it would be better to print to more than one page to spread out the waveform, or maybe you could restrict the output to a specific time range.

Printing to a file in MAX+plus II

Ensure that the Waveform Editor window has the focus. Go to File->Print Setup and you will get a dialog box like that shown in Figure 1 below. If you happen to be printing waveforms, then you will most likely want to check the Landscape box.

Figure 1: Print Setup dialog

Click on Options in the Print Setup dialog, and the dialog in Figure 2 should appear.

Figure 2: Print Options dialog

Check the "Print To File" option and type in a descriptive name for your output. Click OK, and you will be returned to Print Setup. Click OK again.

Note that all print jobs from this point on will be in Landscape format, and printed to the filename that you specified. If you do not want to overwrite the output file, you will have to specify a new filename for each print job.

Choose File -> Print... and make sure that you set the Time Range and Number of Pages properly. Chances are, 0.0ns to 1000.0ns on 1 page would not produce the best output. Restrict the time range to your region of interest, and if that region is very busy, consider using more than one page. Suppose that we're only interested in the first 600ns of simulation. Suppose also that there are lots of changing values and that we want to see all of them, so that cramming everything into one page would be a bad idea. Figure 3 shows an example of what you might do.

Figure 3: Sample Print dialog, with non-default Time Range and Pages

Viewing a Postscript File

From a shell prompt, run ghostview:

  % ghostview &

Once ghostview has started up, go to File -> Open and use the file selection dialog (Figure 4) to open your postscript file.

Figure 4: Ghostview File Selector

Note that the scrollbars in the file selector do not behave in the "usual" way. Left-clicking scrolls forward, right-clicking scrolls back, and dragging with the middle button positions the top of the scrollbar wherever your mouse pointer is.

Once the file has been opened, examine it to see if it looks right. What you see is what you get. If any critical waveform values do not show up, then you will have to reprint.

If ghostview doesn't work

In CEB 531, you may get the following error message when you run ghostview and attempt to open a postscript file:

  ld.so.1: gs: fatal: libXext.so.0: open failed: No such file or directory

This means that ghostview requires the libXext library to do its work, but it could not find the library anywhere. Most likely, this means that your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is not set appropriately. If your shell is csh (the default) or tcsh, add the following line to your .cshrc or .tcshrc file:

  setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH $LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/openwin/lib

If your shell is bash, add the following line to your .bashrc file:

  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/openwin/lib

Note that any changes that you make to your rc files will not take effect in your current terminal window. You must type the above lines at the command line or start a new terminal window.

If ghostview still doesn't work

If you are unable to fix this problem, then you will have to run ghostview from another machine, such as the HP's in CEB 540. If your postscript files are on the Suns, FTP them over to your HP disk space.

To run ghostview from one of the HPs and have it show up on a local terminal, you will need to do a little setup at both ends.

On the remote system, set the DISPLAY environment variable to the name of the local host, with ":0" appended to the end of the name. For example, if you were telnetted to hp05 from cad20, and your shell is csh (the default) or tcsh you would type:

  hp05% setenv DISPLAY "cad20:0"

bash or ksh users should type:

  hp05$ export DISPLAY="cad20:0"

On the local system, indicate that the remote system should be allowed to make a connection to the local X server:

  cad20% xhost hp05

Having done all that, you should be able to run most X programs remotely.

  hp05% ghostview &