Ian's backplotter

[Ray <rehenry-at-up.net>]

I added a screen shot to the linuxcnc.org/Dropbox of Paul's backplotter as
re-arranged by Ian.  It is named tkbackplot.gif.  It shows a plot of
cds.ngc from about the same viewing angle as the 3D view of my old
plotter.  A tar, a tgz file with .vert extension, a text file, and the gif
are all there for your use. 

One big advantage of the Paul/Ian plotter is that after you have run
your program with the plotter active, you can zoom and rotate that plot as
you like.  I found that it takes a little time playing with the controls to
figure out how to get the view that I want.  Once I learned how to do that,
the zoom and rotate features are very nice.  My PII-366 took about 6.8
seconds to recompute all 9000+ vectors in the cds program. 

A second big advantage of this new plotter is that it handles six axis work
as easily as the old one handled three.  Ian's modifications make it
possible for the backplotter to sit alongside a tkemc screen rather than
overlapping the windows.

The only drawback to it is that you can't switch between viewing angles on
the fly like you could with the old one.  But this version is not near the
memory hog that mine was.  I recommend that you try out the new plotter and
post your comments here concerning it.  We will soon make it the default
popup with tkemc.

Thanks Ian and Paul.

Ray