Introduction

In SEP-65, I described an interactive data processing environment that I developed called IPE. Briefly, IPE allows you to use existing batch programs in a pseudo-interactive manner, complete with buttons and sliders that can be used to change parameter values. No programming is required; all that is needed is an ASCII description of the parameters for each program.

While IPE is fine for many purposes, in other cases it is overkill. This became clear during the development of interactive documents at SEP (Karrenbach and Nichols, 1990). If we want to let users modify one or two parameters in the processing sequence used to generate a particular figure, IPE, which shows the user all the parameters of all the programs in the processing sequence, confuses the issue unnecessarily.

In this paper, I discuss an X-Windows utility called xvpanel that I have written to address this need. Xvpanel allows the user to create a panel (similar in appearance to IPE but more modest) that runs a job interactively. Xvpanel's advantage is not only that the result is more compact, but also that all of the information needed to construct the interactive panel is specified on the command line with a few simple arguments. Thus it is easier to use than IPE. Also, since isn't built upon a pipelined approach to processing seismic data, it may have a wider range of applicability.