Stand-alone Viewport

To get a viewport on a page, you first need to create on in Axiom and write it out to a file that can be called up. For example, we draw a saddle function and assign the result to the variable v.

Now that we've created the viewport, we want to write the data out to a file. To do this, we use the write command which takes as arguments the viewport to write out, the title of the file to be written to, and an optiona argument telling the write command what type (or types) of data you want to write (in addition to the ones that Axiom writes). The optional argument could be a string, like "pixmap", or a list of strings, like ["postscript", "pixmap"]. We need a "bitmap" data type to include a graph in a page so in this case, we write the viewport and tell it to also write a "pixmap" file:

Currently supported file formats are "pixmap", "bitmap", "postscript" and "image". Axiom automatically adds ".view" at the end of the viewport data file to specify the file type. The ".view" is actually a directory and contains a bitmap file, usually called image.bm.Z, which is a compressed bitmap. Firefox can display bitmap files, as shown here. Clicking on the image should start a "live graphics copy" so you can manipulate the image.