[GRASS-user] Qn on using Grass on windows

[Michael Barton]

One of the main goals of revamping the GUI, starting 5 years ago or so, was to make it possible to display maps on Windows, or any platform for that matter, without having to emulate antiquated graphics terminals. 

The current display canvas in GRASS does this. You can display maps in this canvas by adding them to the map layer list in several ways:

1) picking them from a list with a mouse or trackpad
2) typing the name of the map if you can remember it or like to type
3) typing the display command in the GRASS command console (e.g., type "d.rast elevation.dem" for the Spearfish demo set), if you like commands. 

As several people mentioned, you can also set the PNG driver to send display output to a file of your choice, type a display command at the msys command prompt and then look at the the graphic file with a viewer of some sort. The down side of this latter approach is that all you have is a graphic file of the map. You can't do any kind of GIS work on it. 

If you display it in the GRASS display canvas, you can also do a lot with the visualization--zooming and panning, measurement, profiling, etc.

Michael
____________________
C. Michael Barton
Director, Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity 
Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Arizona State University

voice: 	480-965-6262 (SHESC), 480-727-9746 (CSDC)
fax:          480-965-7671 (SHESC),  480-727-0709 (CSDC)
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton, http://csdc.asu.edu




On Aug 12, 2011, at 6:12 AM, <grass-user-request at lists.osgeo.org> <grass-user-request at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

> Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:51:22 -0700
> From: Vishal Mehta <vishalm1975 at gmail.com>
> Subject: [GRASS-user] Qn on using Grass on windows
> To: GRASS user list <grass-user at lists.osgeo.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <CALQaJh7-1FFx_GjiDQto6TWuVhSQQ=ycVftw2DRnMqkwXGQauQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm quite new to using Grass on Windows, and would like to have the same
> experience as using it in a shell environment.
> 
> I recently installed Grass 6.4 on Windows through the OSGEO4 installer, and
> i managed to configure some settings so that i can use MSys.
> 
> However, when i enter my grass location and mapset, gis.m starts up with
> some monitors etc. in the Msys shell when i try to display a map
> like
> d.rast srtm
> 
> it seems to going into a png driver. how do i get my display commands to
> display on the monitors that open up through the GIS manager?
> 
> thanks,
> Vishal