March 2006
Main publication concerning the method is Lièvre A., Brouard N. and Heathcote Ch. (2003) Estimating Health Expectancies from Cross-longitudinal surveys. Mathematical Population Studies.- 10(4), pp. 211-248
Until June 2004 the installation did consist in a zip file which
had to be extracted in the directory of your choice. But with version
0.98d IMaCh we are using a windows installer (Inno setup). Both
executables imach.exe and gnuplot.exe (the grapher
that we are using) have to be on the same directory.
In order to facilitate the use of IMaCh we associated the .imach
extension to two features: editing and running. Thus by right clicking
on a foo.imach file you can either 'edit'the file (default) with
the notepad editor or 'run' it with gnuplot (you need a recent version).
But we discovered that on some computers, people are not allowed
to modify the windows registry and need to have Administrator privileges.
Thus we built two windows installer: a standard setup which will install
the progam (usually in \Program Files\imach and will
modify the registry to associate .imach extension to notepad and imach, and a
second which will not alter the registry. With this second installer you
will be able to install the programs in your home directory and
run it by clicking on the imach.exe icon. But you won't be able
to use the facility of the right clicking.
Old Windows versions are accessible here.
It take a litle more time to get latest version of Gnuplot 4.0 for Mac
OS/X and to compile it on a MaC (sources tar.gz can be also accessed on our site from here. The main problem resides in finding
the png library. Gif images are patented now and the replacement is
png, but the development of the png library is growing on its own and
you just have to find on Google where it is hosted now.
Gnuplot can be easily compiled on a MaC, but I don't know yet (July
2004) which is default screen terminal driver for gnuplot.
As already said you need libpng (to be included in terms) which itself needs zlib on the same directory level. Boths sources can be acessed on the Web but here you can get the sources used on the MacOS/X Panther version (libpng-1.2.5.tgz and zlib-1.2.1.tar.gz.
If X11 is already installed on your MaC (it is included on your installation CD
or you can download it from the WEB), then you can do set ter
X11 and plot sin(x) to get a nice sin curve on an X11
window of your Mac.
Let me add that for running IMaCh with all of its features, you don't
need X11; the gnuplot program included in the distribution needs only
to have the png terminal driver to output graphs and these graphs will
be viewed by your browser.
You need X11 only if you want to modify and test the gnuplot code output by
ImaCh, because it might be a more convenient way to view the graphs
directly on the screen than writing images on a file and viewing them
with a browser,
You can download a .pkg.pax file at imach097b.pkg.pax. Stuffit Expander will expand the compressed file into a imach097b.pkg directory. Just clicking on the directory will let you install IMaCh in a local directory of your own (you have to create a new folder name IMaCh097b or whatever). Two sub-directories are created bin and html . In the bin subdirectory you will find two executables imach itself and gnuplot.
You can also download a dmg file (octobre 2005) still for Panther only (we do not have a Tiger version at INED yet) at imach-0.98panther.dmg.
You need to click on imach and IMaCh will be launched in a
Terminal window, asking you to enter a parameter file. A
parameter file is text file with an extension .imach (but you
can use a .txt extension if you want. Among the parameters
required, a data file name has to be entered. It can be a relative
file name like ../../data/data1.txt.
If you open a new
finder you can drag an IMaCh parameter file into the terminal IMaCh
Window that you just created.
At the end of the run, and it order for the terminal window not to
disappear, the program will prompt for a command like "e" for
edit or "q" for quit. The edit command might not work
on a MaC, or on Unix or even on recent Windows, because the program should know which
browser you are using and becauee the BROWSER environment
doesn't seem to be standard on a Mac and on some other OS too.
The consequence for you is just that you have to use your finder
or browser (there is no more difference now) and click on the
.html (or .htm) file created. The filename of this html
file is the same name as your parameter file, only the extension
.imach is changed to .html.
Click here to access to the detailed documentation
This software have been partly granted by Euro-REVES, a concerted action from the European Union. In 2003-2004 it has been granted by the French Institute on Longevity. Our work is copyrighted as a GNU software product, i.e. program and software can be distributed freely for non commercial use, but actually some sources are not widely distributed today because they borrow some codes from the book "Numerical Recipes in C" which is copyrighted. If you are an owner of theses sources you can get our sources by asking us with a simple justification (name, email, Institute) mailto:imach-dev@listes.ined.fr
Today we are two developpers only but we already use a private CVS server. The CVS server will be freely accessible as soon as we have replaced "Numerical Recipes in C maximization routines" with equivalent routines from the new GNU scientific library.
Latest documentation can be accessed at http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach
There is a public mailing list of IMaCh's users. You can subscribe by sending a mail to imach-users-subscribe@listes.ined.fr (and unsubscribe with imach-users-unsubscribe@listes.ined.fr
Wikis are a very promising way to give information closer to your expectations. It also a very dynamic movement if you consider the first International Wikimedia Conference in Francfurt (August 2005), where most Wikis were represented and in particular Wikipedia.
Access to the new (August 2005) IMaCh Wiki