Introduction
There are four interfaces to Magics. A FORTRAN interface (see section “FORTRAN Interface” on page 3)
provides the usage familiar to users of MAGICS 6; C and Python interfaces (see section “C Interface” on page 8
and 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 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-
tion, 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 in this manual will use the FORTRAN interface, but enough information will be given to enable the
user to perform all tasks using MagML, C and Python.
This chapter also describes various tools Magics++ provides to work with the Magics library. These tools are
the MagML_interpretor, the magics-config script and the magicsCompatibilityChecker.