AquaTerm is a Mac OS X plotting front end (graphics terminal) written using Objective-C and the Cocoa API. It allows other applications to display vector graphics and images using a simple API. This is useful for displaying graphics generated by old code natively in Aqua. AquaTerm will let you print and save the output as PDF or EPS files.

You connect to AquaTerm through an “adapter”, a small code snippet that will have to be linked with your old code. If you are lucky, an adapter is already available for download, otherwise you’ll have to write your own adapter using one of the examples provided.

Our aim is to provide as many adapters as possible for command line UNIX programs and scripting languages and we would be happy to host any efforts to write new adapters. At present, there are adapters for gnuplot, PGPLOT and PLplot. Examples written in C, FORTRAN and Objective-C are available.