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No labels and tick marks are shown up on plots made from some SAS tasks. What is the problem and how to fix it?

Latest versions of HEADAS/HEASOFT (since version 6.1) include a version of pgplot that results incompatible with the one used by SAS. The consequence is that some SAS tasks (e.g. epatplot, omgsource, and many more), which use pgplot to make simple plots, do not work properly. The symptoms are missing labels and/or tick marks on the output plots.

To use pgplot, SAS does not require to define the environment variable PGPLOT_FONT. Such variable can be used to define where to find a pgplot propietary file named grfont.dat. However, since HEADAS/HEASOFT is initialized before SAS, it sets the PGPLOT_FONT variable to its own grfont.dat file. But in the newer versions of HEADAS/HEASOFT, the grfont.dat file included is in ASCII format while the SAS pgplot expects to find it in binary format.

To fix this problem, the only trick we have found to work is the following:

setenv PGPLOT_FONT $SAS_DIR/libsys/grfont.dat (csh/tcsh)

export PGPLOT_FONT $SAS_DIR/libsys/grfont.dat (sh/bash/ksh)

The file $SAS_DIR/libsys/grfont.dat can be extracted from the libsys tar.gz archive for each particular supported operating system. This file can be found for first time downloads of SAS 7.1.0, under the Misc directory, after filling the download questionaire.

For those who have downloaded SAS 7.1.0 already, you can find the specific libsys tar.gz archive for your operating system, directly in here, without having to fill again the download questionaire.

We warn you to handle the libsys tar.gz archive very carefully, in particular, to not install it by default. Doing it might render useless your SAS installation. Instead of that, simply extract only the grfont.dat file from the archive, as follows:

tar zxf xmmsas_20100423_1801-platform-libsys.tar.gz xmmsas_20100423_1801/libsys/grfont.dat (Linux/Solaris)

tar zxf xmmsas_20100423_1803-platform-libsys.tar.gz xmmsas_20100423_1803/libsys/grfont.dat (Mac OS X)

Check after the extraction that the only file below libsys is grfont.dat.