CERN -- European Laboratory for Particle Physics

HP-GL Viewer

Windows Installation at CERN

[CAD Support] [HP-GL Viewer] [CERN Installation Guide]

1. Installing the HP-GL Viewer

We recommend to use the HP-GL Viewer centrally installed on NICE. However, PC users having special constraints may perform a local installation of the HP-GL Viewer. 

Installation on a CERN NICE PC

Installation of HP-GL viewer using CMF from the NICE servers on Windows
  1. Right-click on the CMF icon on the task bar. 
  2. Select Add/Remove CMF Packages. 
  3. Find in the list CERN - HPGL Viewer 5.43. 
  4. Click the checkbox and click Save. 
  5. CMF will schedule the installation to install the program.

Manual Installation from the Distribution Package

On a CERN PC, which does not have CMF installed or which for some reason cannot access the NICE servers, it is possible to install the viewer manually from the CERN distribution package:

Manual installation of HP-GL viewer from the distribution package on Windows
  1. Click on the following link to download the distribution package: hpglview-543_Windows.zip. 
  2. Make a directory for the viewer. We strongly suggest C:\Program Files\HpglView. 
  3. Use WinZip or some other unzip program to open the zip-archive into this directory. 
  4. Run the included hpglview.reg file to configure the file associations and mime types. In case of problems, they can also be configured manually as described below. 

2. Configuring your WWW Browser

WWW based services such as CDD or EDMS allow you to have a Web access to HP-GL drawings. To have this possibility, your WWW browser must be configured to launch the HP-GL viewer when you click on a link to an HP-GL file. If the standard CERN NICE installation has been correctly carried out, all appropriate configuration steps should have been done. However, sometimes it can happen that the file associations get corrupted usually after an installation of another program, which touches those settings. In that case, the file associations can be reconfigured manually as follows:

Configuring Internet Explorer

Configuration of file and mime types for the HP-GL viewer on Windows
  1. Go to Windows Control Panel and select Folder Options. 
  2. Select category File Types. 
  3. Find in the list of file types extension HPG. If it doesn't exist, click New to create it. 
  4. Go to the area below which says Details for 'HPG' extension. Does it say Opens with hpglview? 
  5. If not, click Advanced. An Edit File Type dialog opens up. 
  6. If there is no file type or if it's some automatically generated string, change it to something sensible, for example HP-GL Image. 
  7. If there is no action open in the Actions area, click New to create it. If it does exist, click Edit to edit it. In either case another dialog opens up. 
  8. The Action property should read open and the Application should give path and parameters to the installed executable file of the viewer, for example "C:\Program Files\HpglView\hpglview.exe" "%1". Note that in the preceding example the quotes are important. 
  9. Click OK in each dialog to close them. 
  10. Repeat for extensions HPGL and PLT. 

If you have any problems, please contact EDMS Support. 

[CAD Support] [HP-GL Viewer] [CERN Installation Guide]
CERN -- HP-GL Support, modified 2024-05-07