That makes sense - is " the modern way" to get the data into an environment with robust visualization, as fast as possible? For small things, personally I am a fan of dumping PETSc binaries and opening them in MATLAB (doesn't require any special configuration on the library anymore, as far as I can tell), and I think that also works with python. That also works well dumping to VTK. This is a topic which might be very welcome for beginners in the tutorials, as there is often an expectation of being able to scope things. On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 3:45 PM, Matthew Knepley <[email protected]> wrote:

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 1:58 AM, Patrick Sanan <[email protected]> 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get very frustrated when they expect these sorts of things to "just work," so it's probably constructive to remove any outdated information here:

- 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?

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

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saw that there were some updates to the drawing tools recently by Lisandro, so if any of this material is known to be out of date, that would be helpful to know.

I think graphics is not so much out of date now as incomplete. We really want to be telling people to do things the modern way, but the old ways still work.

Matt

-- What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead. -- Norbert Wiener