Carnac

Fast C++ Toolkit for 2D Graphics

Carnac offers fully interactive data display, from map-based graphical selection to interactive schematics, as well as the ability to share views across the web.

Cross-platform Tools and Outstanding Performance
 
Carnac has been designed with performance as its primary goal, with every component tailored to optimally drive the native graphics pipeline. Most Carnac-written applications will be faster than applications written using native graphics directly. Carnac also permits developers to fast-track development of their applications under Qt, Windows MFC or Unix Motif. Carnac's outstanding performance and cross-platform support make it the leading product in its target market.

Carnac's Distributed Architecture

Carnac's distributed architecture is ideal for developing Web applications, including enabling technologies such as ActiveX controls and Netscape plug-ins.

Carnac's components are connected using a proxy interface, which can be easily distributed. For example, Carnac's Web scene is used to distribute graphic objects across the Web.

Benefits

  • Full cross-platform support 
  • Extensible, portable, integratable
  • Scalable graphics
  • Built-in view management

Features

  • CGM - support extended to 3.0 standard
  • Shapes - Primitive shapes include bezier curves, ellipses, images, polygons, polylines, polymarkers, rectangles, restricted text and scalable text. 
  • Flavors - Flavors are used to augment the primitive shapes, provide application specific symbols, lines symbology, animation sprites, etc. 
  • Attributes - Attributes encapsulate visual properties of shapes, including line color, line style, line pattern, fill color, fill style, fill pattern, font attributes and marker styles. Different attributes can be set per target device (hardcopy, for example). 
  • Scenes - Memory scenes: optimized for very fast shape creation. Suitable to handle tens of thousands of objects. Paged scenes: shapes are spatially stored in a file. Application has control over the size of the memory cache. Optimized to handle up to millions of objects. Dynamic scenes: provides a mechanism to generate shapes on the fly from a database, an algorithm or over the web. Data compression techniques and filtering can be implemented to minimize network traffic. 
  • Views - Support View laying, filtering and buffering. Extensive View composition support, including embedded views. Scenes can be visualized using multiple views, with automatic propagation of updates. 
  • Interaction - Extensive support for interaction is available, including selection, scaling, reshaping and rotation. Interaction primitives can be applied to single or multiple shapes. 
  • Thread safe - Systems that support multithreading can implement the rendering part of Carnac, as a separate thread. Methods are provided to enforce internal locking and preserve data integrity.
  • Persistence - Built-in support for binary and ASCII serialization of scenes and palettes. 
  • Drivers - Drivers are available for Qt3. Qt4. Win32, X-Window, OpenGL, PostScript and CGM. 
  • Online documentation - All documentation (Getting Started, Users Guide, and Reference) is available in HTML format for easy access on-line
  • Hardcopy output - PostScript is provided, and CGM is optional.

 

 

Plot Toolkit - The integrated Plot components can be used for general plotting purpose, to display XY-plots for example, or for more domain specific applications, including contour, seismic or log displays. Some of the main features provided in the Plot Framework are described below:

CGMOutput

CGMOutput is an add-on module that can be used to output a display to a CGM file. CGM (Computer Graphic Metafile) is particularly well-suited for describing large plots and is a standard graphics file format used by many industries such as Oil & Gas, Aerospace and Automotive. The CGMOutput module is compatible with other Carnac modules, including Seismic, where it uses the special CGM+ extensions for generating seismic traces.

Availability

Carnac is available on Linux, Windows, SGI and Solaris for 32bit and 64bit architectures.