Ken, We totally understand your frustration. For this very reason, we have started working on an online version of a user's guide for ParaView which will be freely available. With every release of ParaView we will package a pdf file which will serve as the manual for that release.
You can look at the current state of this document at http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Users_Guide/Table_Of_Contents. It's still under development, but we plan to have most of the sections filled in by ParaView 3.10 release. Utkarsh On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Ken Olum <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for the quick answer to my question about installing macros. > > I'm writing now because I'm very unhappy about the state of the > documentation. Let me say that paraview is a great program and it > enables me to make beautiful visualizations. So I am reluctant to > criticize the developers, but it really is remarkably difficult to > learn to use. It's bad enough that I'm seriously considering > abandoning paraview and using something else. > > I hope that you would like to have a product that new users can learn > to use without too much frustration, so let me go through my recent > experiences to show why I'm so frustrated. > > I would like to display stereoscopic images. So I looked in the > Paraview Guide for any mention of stereoscopic display. It isn't > there. I tried the online help, but there is no index, so I can't > search for it. I tried various help topics, but didn't find anything > relevant. > > So I went to the net. I couldn't find any documentation for stereo, > but at least there is some archived discussion, so I learned that > there is a "--stereo" command line switch. So far so good, but how > can I control how it renders the stereo? I got a list of commandline > options, and there is a set of modes. But what are they? What do the > options mean? I have access to a "visualization wall" which sends > side-by-side display of the stereo frames to overlapping > super-anaglyph projectors. Can I use it? How? > > And what about turning it on or off dynamically? There doesn't seem > to be any control of it once paraview is running. But I managed to > learn, again by looking through the archived messages to this list, > that the stereo selection is an option of the viewer, and I was able > to turn it on and off using the python shell. Excellent! > > So then I thought, "Can I make this into something I can click on?" I > see that there is a "Macros" tab, and a macro is just what I want. > Back to the online help. No mention of macros. Back to the book. No > mention of macros there either. I didn't mind paying $80 for this > book, since the software is free, but at least I thought for $80 it > would answer my questions. > > OK. Back to the net. Aha. There is a Wiki page on "Python GUI > Tools". The first topic is Macros. What does it say? "The > management of macros is done inside the Macros menu". Click on > "Macros". The only item is "<empty>". Oops. > > What does it say next? "Macros allow the user to define a Python > script as built-in actions that become accessible from the Macros menu > or directly inside the Toolbar." Just what I want! Great! But how > do I do it? "Once a local file is defined as a Macro the given file > is copied inside the user specific ParaView directory." OK, but HOW > do I define a local file as a Macro? Nothing further is mentioned in > this file. > > So I posted to this list, and right away I got an answer. Thanks! > That's great, but should I really just post my question here first? > It seems I ought to try to answer my questions before bothering > everyone, but I'm not having much success. > > In any case, while the answer (from Sebastien Jourdain) answered my > question perfectly, he also said "We recently changed the Macro menu > and the way that macros are managed. The wiki explains the new way." > Does it? All I could see was what I quoted above, which does not > include any mention of how to define a macro. Maybe if I actually had > the new version it would be obvious, but I certainly couldn't figure > it out from this file. > > Anyway, shouldn't the documentation correspond to the latest version > that one can download from the download site? Or, at least, shouldn't > it say that it corresponds to a later version and make it easy for me > to find the documentation corresponding to the version I have? > > Again, I'm sorry to be so critical (and so verbose), but I beg you to > consider the plight of new users and make things not so frustrating. > > Ken > _______________________________________________ > Powered by www.kitware.com > > Visit other Kitware open-source projects at > http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html > > Please keep messages on-topic and check the ParaView Wiki at: > http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView > > Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: > http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview > _______________________________________________ Powered by www.kitware.com Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Please keep messages on-topic and check the ParaView Wiki at: http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview
