[petsc-dev] What's the easiest route (for a beginner) to visualize a solution from a PETSc example?

[Smith, Barry F.]

  Indeed. Far too many possibilities, with Matlab alone there is 
    * binary view
    * matlab binary viewer
    * ascii viewer
    * matlab engine
    * socket viewer to matlab


> On Jul 25, 2019, at 1:32 AM, Patrick Sanan via petsc-dev <petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> This came up in the beginner's working group meeting. We all seemed to agree that a very powerful thing for beginners is to be able to run a set of well-defined instructions to go from 0 to being able to solve and visualize a simple problem (I'm imagining a PDE on a 2D spatial domain).
> 
> PETSc itself isn't a visualization library, obviously, so there are many ways to visualize data but most involve some external tools. We'd be interested in opinions on what we should recommend to beginners, for example one or more of:
> - Dump binary, load into MATLAB/Octave/Python+numpy+matplotlib
> - Dump something which Paraview and/or VisIt can open
> - Use PETSc's native drawing (X window) capabilities 
> - Include custom script for the tutorials, say which requires libpng and produces an image
> - ASCII art
>