The tutorial

The tutorial teaches VTKFortran by building one program, step by step: heat, a small solver of the heat equation in a cube, whose output grows from a first file to a parallel, restartable time series. The cookbook then collects short recipes, and the reference has every procedure and every argument.

The chapters

Two hot blobs cool down in a cube whose walls are kept at zero temperature: 24 points along each side, explicit time steps. The physics takes a dozen lines and stays the same in every chapter; what changes is how the solution is written. Each chapter is a complete program that you can compile and run; every output and every picture shown is the real output of that program, the pictures rendered by ParaView from the files it writes.

Chapter	You learn
1. A first file	vtk_file, a rectilinear grid, point data, the ASCII format
2. Formats	binary, raw and base64 appended data, zlib compression: what each format costs
3. More data	vectors, field data (time and cycle), the active arrays of a reader
4. A time series	one file per output, pvd_file: the series ParaView plays
5. An unstructured mesh	points, hexahedra, connectivity, cell data
6. Going parallel	pieces written by each process, a .pvtu header, ghost cells, check_pieces
7. An assembly	polydata probes, a multi-block .vtm with nested blocks, read back
8. Restart	read the last file of the series and continue it, appending to the collection

The cookbook

The cookbook answers "how do I ...?" in a few lines each: write each kind of dataset, vectors and tensors, field data, ghost cells, compression, 64-bit ids, parallel headers and their check, restarts, files in memory, and reading arrays, meshes and files written by VTK.

Building the examples

Every program of the tutorial and of the cookbook is in docs/examples/src. With VTKFortran built by FoBiS with zlib (fobis build --mode static-gnu-zlib, see Installation):

gfortran -I static/mod docs/examples/src/heat_1.f90 static/libvtkfortran.a -lz -o heat
./heat

scripts/docs_examples.sh builds and runs them all, as the documentation does.