[petsc-dev] Known outdated sections of the User's Manual?

[Barry Smith]

> On Jun 24, 2016, at 3:58 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm working on some groundwork to improve the PETSc documentation, and
> the next thing I'd like to look at is the User's Manual, adding
> slightly-prettier code listings (as in the update to the dev manual).
> 
> Before doing that, however,  it would be very helpful to know if there
> are any sections of the manual which are known, by the relevant
> experts here, to require deletion or heavy rewrites; it would of
> course be a waste of time to format these.
> 
> Specifically, I'm wondering about the following sections, which have
> in common that they are things concerned with friendly external tools.
> I've seen new users get very frustrated when they expect these sorts
> of things to "just work," so it's probably constructive to remove any
> outdated information here:
> 

    Take out chapter 10  Using ADIFOR with PETSc we have no support for this.

> - Chapter 11: Using MATLAB with PETSc . The support here has changed
> quite a lot, so I'm not sure what currently works. Is the MATLAB
> Compute Engine still supported?

   Everything here is supported. What is missing is that the section 11.1 Dumping Data for MATLAB should have two parts:

1) Dumping small amounts of data with ASCII files and (what is there now) and

2) Dumping larger data with the binary viewer and loading it with PetscBinaryRead.m

under 2 it should also mention PetscViewerPushFormat(viewer,PETSC_VIEWER_BINARY_MATLAB) this causes a .m script to be generated that reads the all the data objects from the binary file and formats them appropriately. For example DMDA vectors get automatically properly shaped in Matlab. See for example src/dm/examples/tutorials/ex7.c 

> 
> - Sections 15.10-15.14: Eclipse/Qt Creator/Developers Studio/XCode
> users. This is likely not all current. Is this information helpful
> here?

   Though not a lot of people use this stuff we need to keep this information somewhere. Better in the users manual then lost in some file?

> 
> - Section 15.15 : Graphics. I saw that there were some updates to the
> drawing tools recently by Lisandro, so if any of this material is
> known to be out of date, that would be helpful to know.

   Nothing wrong with the data here. It is just missing some stuff like tikz, simple savings of movies and images