[Gmsh] GMSH postprocessing

[an_koch at arcor.de]

Hi,

I have a queation concerning the postprocessing of time dependent data with GMSH which is really a useful program with a lot of nice features. I use GMSH for visualizing results of nonlinear FE-calculations, mainly structural problem. Therefore I define for each variable a seperate VIEW in GMSH (binary file format), i.e. each time-dependent variable (stress, total strain, plastic strain...) is stored in a separate VIEW . For each VIEW I have to store the whole topology of the model which is quiet ineffective in my opinion, since the underlying mesh is the same for all the variables. Is there another more efficient way to do this? 
Another remark: the way variables have to be stored in the postprocessing file confused me., e.g. nodes have to be stored like this
node1.x node2.x node3.x ...
node1.y node2.y node3.y ...
 
rather than

node1.x, node1.y, node1.z
node2.x, node2.y, node2.z ...

the second method is more natural in my opinion, since it's representing the way variables are stored in an array. Morover it's easier an more efficient to write
fwrite(node1.x, sizeof(double), 3, out)
rather than 
for n=0, number of  nodes
  for i=0, all directions
     fwrite(node[n].x[i], sizeof(double),1,out)
It's the same for time-dependent data.

Looking forward to hearing from you.