Introduction
There are four interfaces to Magics. A FORTRAN interface (see section “FORTRAN Interface” on page 3)provides The FORTRAN Interface provides the usage familiar to users of MAGICS 6; C and Python interfaces (see section “C Interface” on page 8and section “Python Interfaces” on page 10) provide identical functionality for C and Python programmers; and an XML- based interface, MagML (see section “MagML Interface” on page 16), is an interpreted plot de-scription and JSON-based interface MagJSON, is interpreted plot descriptions that can be parsed and run without the need for a compile/link cycle.
A Magics program consists of calls to action routines, each of which is configured by changing zero or more parameters. Parameters in Magics are the attributes to be assigned to the various items that make up plotted output, such as line style, colour and size of plot. They can also be used to define such items as map projec-tionprojection, contouring minimum/maximum levels. Sensible default values for most parameters exist, so it may be the case that very few parameters need to be set in order to obtain meaningful output. An example of a parameter that has no default value is GRIB_INPUT_FILE_NAME - if loading a GRIB file, this parameter must first be set.
Exactly how parameters are set and action routines are called depends on which interface is used. Most ex-amples examples in this manual will use the FORTRAN interfaceor Python interfaces, but enough information will be given to enable the user to perform all tasks using MagML, MagJSON and C and Python.
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the MagML_interpretor, the magics-config script and the magicsCompatibilityChecker.
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