[esp-r] Re: CFD results

[Jon Hand (clcv10)]

A recent question asking why and XPM graphics file is generated for  
CFD results...

Several reasons, mostly pragmatic
   - an XPM file is an ASCII file so there is no issue moving it  
between machines
   - an XPM file is a public standard (so we could figure out what  
its contents were)
   - an XPM file was something that we figured out how to write to  
without
        having to have lots of external dependencies
   - and there were multiple options for converting that file into  
other file
     formats but mostly it was not much of a hassle on Linux and Unix  
and
     Mac OSX machines.

In our general move to the GTK toolkit I suspect that we will find that
it is possible to easily generate other file formats.

-Jon