Prerequisites

• Compilation and execution of JaxoDraw requires an installed and configured Java environment on your system. To execute JaxoDraw you need a Java Runtime Environment (jre), while for compilation you need the Java Developer Kit (jdk, which includes the jre). The minimum version to compile and execute the program is Java 11. The most recent version of Java can be obtained from Oracle. Please refer to the Oracle web pages for information on how to install Java on your system.

  We only support the official java from Oracle. Please only report problems if you encounter them with an official java version.

• If you want to compile JaxoDraw yourself from sources, you need to install Apache Maven version 3.0 or above.

• If you want to use the Postscript preview option of JaxoDraw, you need to specify an external Postscript viewer.

Unpacking the archives

Any of the packages available for download are unpacked with the command

unzip jaxodraw-xxx_zzz.zip

under Linux or with the unzip utility under Windows. Here xxx is the version number and zzz is either src or bin. This will create a directory named jaxodraw-xxx (the JaxoDraw home directory) in the current directory.

For the src distribution the JaxoDraw home directory has the following structure:

The following directories are not present in the original source distribution, they may be generated by the ant build script (see below) or have to be created manually:

Compiling the sources

From version 3.0 on, you have to use Apache Maven 3 to compile the program. Please refer to the Apache Maven web pages for documentation on Maven.

To compile the sources and create the binary .jar file:

mvn package

To just compile the sources without creating the .jar file:

mvn compile

To create the distribution archives (src.zip and bin.zip):

mvn -Pdist package

In all cases, you may use the skipTests profile to accelerate the build, e.g.:

mvn -PskipTests package

To create the API specification (the javadocs are created in target/site/apidocs/):

mvn javadoc:javadoc

To create the JaxoDraw web site (the site is created in target/site/ (note that this will only generate the User Guide section of the web site, the main JaxoDraw site is built independently):

mvn site

This will generate also the pdf version of the User Guide as well as the javadoc API. You can generate additional code reports by specifying the reporting profile:

mvn -Preporting site

Note that the additional reports are not linked from the generated site, go to the overview page target/site/project-reports.html.

To remove all generated files:

mvn clean

Running the program

If you compiled the package yourself from sources (see Compiling the sources above), you can start JaxoDraw with the command line

java -jar target/jaxodraw-xxx.jar

using the generated binary .jar file.

If you downloaded the pre-compiled binary distribution (.bin), just type

java -jar jaxodraw-xxx.jar

or, depending on your operating system and setup, simply double click on the jar file icon.

JaxoDraw recognizes a small number of optional command line arguments (detailed in the Usage section), and you may also append an arbitrary number of xml files to opened at startup, so the full form of the command to start the program is

java -jar jaxodraw-xxx.jar [options] [file1.xml file2.xml ...]

You should also check the JaxoDraw web site if there are any binary installers available for your operating system, a .exe Windows self-installer, a .dmg disc image for Mac OS X or a .rpm package for Linux.