 
Copyright (c) 1993-1998 Ken Martin, Will Schroeder, Bill Lorensen.

This software is copyrighted by Ken Martin, Will Schroeder and Bill Lorensen.
The following terms apply to all files associated with the software unless
explicitly disclaimed in individual files. This copyright specifically does
not apply to the related textbook "The Visualization Toolkit" ISBN
013199837-4 published by Prentice Hall which is covered by its own copyright.

The authors hereby grant permission to use, copy, and distribute this
software and its documentation for any purpose, provided that existing
copyright notices are retained in all copies and that this notice is included
verbatim in any distributions. Additionally, the authors grant permission to
modify this software and its documentation for any purpose, provided that
such modifications are not distributed without the explicit consent of the
authors and that existing copyright notices are retained in all copies. Some
of the algorithms implemented by this software are patented, observe all
applicable patent law.

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR DISTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR
DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT
OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, ITS DOCUMENTATION, OR ANY DERIVATIVES THEREOF,
EVEN IF THE AUTHORS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

THE AUTHORS AND DISTRIBUTORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.  THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ON AN
"AS IS" BASIS, AND THE AUTHORS AND DISTRIBUTORS HAVE NO OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE
MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.

=========================================================================


1. Introduction
---------------

Welcome to the Visualization Toolkit. 

"The Visualization Toolkit, an Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" is
the title of a new book published by Prentice Hall (ISBN 013199837-4).  

This is version 2.3. In this release there have been many bugs fixed and a
number of new classes. Depending on when you get this, there may be more
recent versions out. For more information and a FAQ see our web page at
http://www.kitware.com/vtk.html


2. Documentation
----------------

The ideal way to learn about the software is from the book it is designed to
support.  You should be able to get the book from any local bookstore or from
our web page. The web page also contains some html reference pages for the
objects in vtk as well as a FAQ.

  The Visualization Toolkit, An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics
  by Will Schroeder, Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen.
  Prentice Hall, Second Edition


3. Installation
---------------

The following instructions only apply to UNIX systems.  
The windows source distribution will be released in a different file.

First we will give you the quick and dirty way to build vtk.
If you have OpenGL, GL, XGL (with header files), or Starbase
do the following:

If you will be using C++ as your development language:

  1) untar the src files
  2) untar the data files
  3) cd vtk
  4) ./configure
  5) read and edit user.make 
  6) make

If you will be using tcl in addition to C++:

  1) untar the src files
  2) untar the data files
  3) cd vtk
  4) obtain and build Tcl/Tk if you don't already have it
  5) ./configure --with-tcl 
  6) read and edit user.make
  7) make

It is a very good idea to tell configure what C and C++ compilers
you will be using. This can avoid many build problems.
On most systems you can pass this information to configure in the 
following way:

env CXX=/your/C++/compiler CC=/your/c/compiler ./configure

otherwise you must set CXX and CC in your environment and then
run configure.

This release has some java support, you can use --with-java but
I think it only works on Sun Solaris and Windows. But feel free 
to experiment.

If you do not have OpenGL, Starbase or XGL the you will need to get and
compile Mesa, a wonderful free version of OpenGL. You will need to add
--with-mesa to your configure line. If you want to try building shared
libraries you can use the --with-shared option also.


Now here is the slightly more detailed version.

This software uses scripts generated by GNU autoconfigure to build itself.
There are a couple of options in building the software that you need to
decide on. First you need to decide if you are going to use the Mesa
rendering library developed by Brian Paul.  This is a software renderer that
vtk can use on Xwindows based workstations.  If your workstation doesn't
support Starbase, XGL, OpenGL or GL then you will need Mesa because you have
no other choice :-) If you want to build the vtk interpreter then you will
need to have Tcl7.4 and Tk4.0 or later. 

Look to http://www.scriptics.com/ for information about getting
Tcl and Tk. To obtain a copy of Mesa, written by Brian Paul, you can
visit http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~brianp/Mesa.html.

To build vtk in the distribution directory just type ./configure
You can specify  --with-tcl  and/or  --with-mesa  on the command line
if you would like to use those packages as well. Building vtk for multiple 
architectures will be discussed later.

To build the vtk library and the tcl bindings and use mesa you would specify

./configure --with-tcl --with-mesa

The command:

./configure --help    

gives some brief help for the command line arguments. If you are using gmake 
then you might want to consider the --srcdir option.

The next step is to modify the user.make file.  If you are using tcl/tk you
must specify the full path to find the include files and libraries.  If you
are using mesa you must do the same. You might also want to specify the
compiler flags.  We recommend compiling without debug information and with
optimizations. The debug information can quadruple the executable size.  If
you are going to be working with the C++ library you might want to look into
using shared libraries. We use them in our development I just didn't figure
out a good way to use them with the GNU autoconfigure stuff. So you might
want to look into modifying the generated Makefiles and user.make to generate
shared libraries. On most machines these days it's not too difficult.

Once this is done you can type make (or gmake if you have it) and it should
compile :-)  

If you are planning to build vtk for multiple architectures then you can
either make a copy of the entire vtk tree for each architecture and then
follow the instructions above. Or if you have gmake, you can have one copy of
the vtk tree and compile it in a different manner. Instead of running
configure from the vtk directory, create a new directory where you have some
free disk space (not in the vtk tree), a possible name would be
vtk-solaris. cd into this directory and then run configure similar to the
following example:

ls /home/joe_user
    vtk vtk-solaris vtk-sgi

cd vtk-solaris
/home/joe_user/vtk/configure --with-tcl 

This will create makefiles in the vtk-solaris directory.  Then you can run
gmake in vtk-solaris to compile vtk.  Repeate this process for each
architecture you wish to build.

4. Execution
------------

Many of the examples require the data found in vtk1.2data.tar.gz. This should
be uncompressed and un-tarred so that there is a data directory in the vtk1.2
directory. The examples that require data look for it in ../../data.
If you compiled with the --srcdir option you may need to create a symbolic 
link to the data directory. 

To run the cc examples just type their name.  To run the tcl examples,
(assuming that you built the tcl stuff) type 

../../tcl/vtk mace.tcl


5. Common Problems
------------------
I got a "warning: no configuration information is in tcl" from configure.
This is correct and is supposed to happen. 

6. Adding a new class to vtk
----------------------------
1) create the .cxx and .h file for the new class in one of the existing 
   directories. 
2) edit Makefile.in for that directory and follow the instructions in
   there. You will need to add the class in only one place.
3) you will need to rerun configure
4) then make (or gmake)


7. Adding a new toolkit to vtk (UNIX version)
---------------------------------------------
The short answer is don't do this, its messy. The best thing to
do is use the contrib directory which was designed for people
to put their own classes into. The contrib directory is 
misnamed since we often put contributed classes into other
directories. Think of contrib as a development directory
for you that happens to include a couple files to serve as
an example for the Makefile.in



