General Description

GINO stands for Graphical INput/Output. It is a graphics package that takes the form of a library of 2D and 3D drawing and administrative routines and is designed to offer implementation and device independent graphics facilities on a wide range of machine platforms. GINO provides a common graphics interface to all the widely available graphics hardware through its many device drivers, to such an extent that in many cases changing one line of a GINO application is all that is needed to enable the application to operate on a different graphics device.

GINO provides a base level of graphics functionality and associated with GINO are a number of additional graphics libraries with specialist functionality in the areas of graph drawing (GINOGRAF), surface and contour drawing (GINOSURF) and the design of graphical user interfaces (GINOMENU). This document details the use of the facilities available within GINO, and a full specification of each routine available.

The association between the user application, GINO and its associated libraries is shown in the diagram below:

User Application and GINO libraries

GINO has been written to be able to control a wide range of graphics devices from a single off-line pen plotter to a sophisticated 24 bit, 3D multi-window networked display through a common routine interface.

This enables large and complex graphical applications to be written in a device independent manner, so that the only step required when switching to another graphics device (possibly in a completely different environment) is to notify GINO of the new device name.