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Introduction
The intention behind this page is not to advertise the new features of Metview 4 (see Version 4 Complete Change History for this), but to help users migrate existing plots and macros from Metview 3 to Metview 4. In general, icons and macros which do no plotting should require very little, if any, modification. Many icons and macros used to produce plots will likewise require little or no modification, but some will need to be updated. These changes, plus some other points of interest are briefly described on this page.
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Metview 3 had an Empty View icon for reserving a blank area of a page. It also had a Text View, into which Annotation icons could be dropped. Metview 4 (from version 4.4 onwards) simplifies these functionalities by introducing a single view, the Annotation View, into which Text Plotting icons can be dropped. The Import View functionality will be available in the Annotation View in the future. An Empty View can be simulated by simply having an Annotation View with nothing in it. This means that the Empty View, Text View, Import View and Annotation icons from Metview 3 are no longer supported.
Curve Plotting
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Another change in Macro is the expansion of the vector data type (see Vectors). Many Macro functions which previously returned lists of numbers will now return a vector (which is more efficient). This should mostly be transparent, since accessing a vector's elements is the same as for a list. However, user functions which explicitly test whether the returned variable is a list should be revised. See List of Operators and Functions.
Inline Fortran/C in Macro
Even within Metview 3, the GRIB_API-based inline Fortran/C routines (the 'MFI' routines) were available and preferred over the 'legacy' GRIBEX-based routines. Recent versions of Metview 4 have used newer versions of emoslib, which do not have GRIBEX support. It is thus now necessary to use the 'MFI' routines to pass parameters between Macro and inline C/Fortran. See Articles and find the PDF link at the top of the page for details on these interface routines.
Output Formats in Macro
Instead of a single output function, Metview 4 uses a set of functions to specify the desired output format, one for each type: ps_output, png_output, etc. It is possible to supply more than one of these to the setoutput() or the plot() commands. in order to obtain multiple formats in one go. One way to see the possible parameters for these functions is to type the appropriate function name in the Macro Editor and press F5 for an interactive help tool.
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