[gradsusr] broken screen graphics

[Jennifer M Adams]

Managing all the version compatibility issues between operating systems and Grads software and all the dependent libraries is a nightmare. 

During development of version 2.1, the latest version of XQuartz for the mac wasn’t rendering the Cairo graphics properly. I was panicking, but a bug fix came out just in time, and I had to put this qualifier in the release notes:

"If you are a Mac user, please be aware that there was long-standing bug in XQuartz that caused Cairo graphics to render improperly in an X window. GrADS 2.1 requires XQuartz 2.7.5 or a pre-2.7.0 release (the X11 Application for older versions of OS X). If you are a Windows user and will be running GrADS through a secure shell connection to a unix platform, I have heard that Xming works for the X display, but Xwin32 does not.” 

That was two years ago, and XQuartz is now at version 2.7.8 (at least for my mac which is running OSX 10.9.5) and GrADS 2.1 still displays normally in X windows without any problems. I have not upgraded to Yosemite or El Capitan because I don’t want to break my GrADS build environment. I have not heard about problems with GrADS on newer macs; you should be able to use GrADS 2.1 on OSX. 

—Jennifer

On Jan 27, 2016, at 11:02 AM, Michael Mase <masester at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had this same issue with 2.1 on OS X as well. Unfortunately, had to stick with 2.0.2 because of the issues.