Introduction

The Real Time Display software, or RTD, described in this document was designed to display atronomical images, either from image files or from some external source, such as a CCD camera or external process via shared memory. One of the development goals was to be able to display images coming from a CCD camera as rapidly as possible, while still having a flexible, user friendly user interface.

Purpose

The purpose of this manual is to describe the widgets and functions implemented in the Real Time Display. In addition, instructions for installing the RTD package and using RTD in applications is provided.

Scope

This document is primarily aimed at software developers using the RTD package. No real end-user documentation is provided here.

Applicable Documents

This document is based on the following documents:

[1] VLT-SPE-ESO-17240-0250, 1.0, 03/04/95 -- VLT Software - Real-Time-Display Software Spec.

[2] VLT-PRO-ESO-10000-0228, 1.0 10/03/93 -- VLT Software Programming Standards

Reference Documents

The following documents are referenced in this document:

[ 1] VLT-MAN-ESO-19400-1550 1.0 19/01/98 -- Tcl and C++ Utilities, Programmer's Manual

[ 2] VLT-MAN-ESO-19400-1551 1.0 19/01/98 -- Astronomical Tcl and C++ Utilities

Abbreviations and Acronyms

The following abbreviations and acronyms are used in this document:

RTD Real Time Display

VLT Very Large Telescope

Stylistic Conventions

The following styles are used:

teletype for examples extracted from the source code, directory and file names, names of programs and functions, and commands as they have to be typed (e.g. in the installation procedure).
<name> in the examples, for parts that have to be substituted with the real contents before typing.