NCL Home > Documentation

NCL Tools Documentation

For an overview of the metafile tools listed below, see the "viewing and editing your metafiles" document.

• WRAPIT - wraps Fortran 77 or 90 code so you can call it directly from NCL.

• ncl_filedump - generates an ASCII representation of a supported file (netCDF, HDF, GRIB1, GRIB2) on the standard output.

• ncl_grib2nc - deprecated, use ncl_convert2nc instead.

• ncl_convert2nc - translates GRIB1, GRIB2, HDF and HDF-EOS files that NCL can read to netCDF-formatted files.

• ctrans - translates an NCAR Computer Graphics Metafile (NCGM) and interprets its instructions on the device defined by the GRAPHCAP environment variable.

• ictrans - an interactive version of the ctrans translator.

• idt (X window interactive image display tool) - provides a graphical user interface to the NCAR View interactive metafile translator ictrans.

• med - a metafile editor.

• psplit - splits PostScript files into individual pages.

• scrip_check_input - checks on the integrity of SCRIP input grid files.

Other tools

• NetCDF Operators (NCO) - A suite of programs known as operators that can perform a variety of operations on netCDF and HDF (Scientific Data Set) files.

• ImageMagick - Free software which is frequently used to convert from one format to another. We use it ourselves to convert PS files created by NCL to PNG files that we can import into PowerPower and other aplications. It may be used independently or implemented from within NCL via the system procedure.

  Here's what we use to convert PS files to PNG:

  convert -geometry 1000x1000 -density 300 -trim file.ps file.png

• mpeg2encode (part of the "mpeg2vidcodec" package) - You can use this in conjunction with "convert" from ImageMagick to generated MPEGs from a multi-frame PS file.

• eps2png - A tool that allows you to create bitmap images from encapsulated PostScript files. It uses Ghostscript to handle the conversion. Supported output formats are PNG, JPG and GIF.