[Gmsh] The GUI suggestions + new bug

Bernhard Kubicek bernhard.kubicek at arsenal.ac.at
Tue Dec 4 13:26:00 CET 2007


On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 11:40 +0100,
=?windows-1252?Q?Jean-Fran=8D=E7ois_Remacle?= wrote:
> Bernhard Kubicek a écrit :
> > I think he means reading and writing of vtk files (postprocessing). I
> > wrote a converter of gmsh-pos format to vtk myself, which however I am
> > not allowed to share without money.
> > The legacy vtk file format is fairly easy:
> > http://www.vtk.org/pdf/file-formats.pdf
> > It could be implemented that reading a vtk file loads a mesh, an
> > multiple post-processing views.
> > Also, it would be nice to being able to load some gmsh-pos files, and
> > then save them alltogether in a single vtk file.
> >
> >   
> Ok.
> 
> Note that we have added the ability for gmsh to render post processing 
> result based on a mesh.
> Files will be much smaller, of course.
> We have not (yet) done any documentation but all that is in the code. At 
> this point, we
> have not 'yet) decided which input/output format we will choose. Vtk is 
This sounds like a great idea.. I am looking forward to that. 
Also, I have often wished to store finite volume data with only one
value per cell, instead of having to give the same value for each node.
Currently, this wastes space, and by concept kind of destroys iso-values
and so on.
Anyways, these are probably not very important things.

> a candidate.
> > Alternatively, I think it would be very cool to use vtk as renderer for
> > gmsh. But that would be a big change.
> >
> >   
> We have chosen NOT to do that several years ago. The reason is pretty 
> simple : without any
> third party software, gmsh's executable size is about 2 MB. When adding 
> vtk, it grows to
> 15 MB. We think this is not acceptable.
I did not know that this is one of the effects. Personally, I have
hesitated to program vtk directly, as I did not want to spend money on
the necessary documentation (i.e., commercial books). Paraview as a GUI
does the job well enough for me. Sorry for having brought this up again.

very nice greetings,
 Bernhard