Trinity College Surface Evolver Workshop


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Surface Evolver Installation for Windows

The Surface Evolver executable and associated files for this workshop are on \\ntserver-usr\get\brakkek\workshop. You should map a network drive, say G:, to this directory. Or you may copy the entire contents of this directory to your machine, in which case you should use that directory in place of G:\ below.

You should set up your PATH to find the Evolver executable. In Control Panel/System/Advanced/Environment Variables, create (or edit, if it exits) the user variable PATH, and give it the value G:\bin (if PATH exist, add ;G:\bin to the end of the list; remember that directories in the list are separated by semicolons.)

You should set up a new user environment variable named EVOLVERPATH and give it the value G:\fe;G:\doc. These are directories where Evolver looks for files if it can't find them in the current directory.

You should set up a working directory on your machine for creating your own files and storing files Evolver creates, since G:\ is not writable by you.

(Optional) Set Evolver to be the default program to open Evolver datafiles by going to My Computer/Folder Options/File Types/New, giving file extension fe. Click OK. Then find FE in the list of Extensions, click on it, Change, Select program from a list, Browse, and pick G:\bin\evolver.exe.

Test by opening a terminal window (i.e. a DOS window; you can do this by entering "cmd" in Start/Run) in your working directory, and run the command evolver quad. You should get a start-up message from Evolver, and a Enter command: prompt, but no graphics yet. To show graphics, use the s command. You should be able to move the surface around by dragging it with the mouse with the left button down. Back in the terminal window, enter q to quit the graphics prompt, q again to quit the surface, and q yet again to quit Evolver.