Beyond Getting Started with ParaView

Development
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I would like to propose a new document be added to the help menu, just below Getting Started with ParaView. I propose the name be “Continuing with ParaView” or “Next Steps with ParaView”. The format should be the same as Getting Started with Paraview. Lets make it 4 pages. The Getting Started guide is designed to get users interacting with ParaView. This document would be designed to give users a taste of ParaView’s breadth. Here are a few items I thought would get the discussion going.

  • Rescale to Data Range and Rescale to Custom Data Range
  • Clip and Slice filter.
  • Sources/ Annotate Time and Text.
  • Presets for color maps.
  • Plot over line
  • Select something/ Plot Selection over Time
  • Histogram filter.
  • Spreadsheet view
  • Save Animation
  • Explicitly show and use the Help/ Example Visualizations

Thoughts?

@mwestphal @cory.quammen @Kenneth_Moreland @utkarsh.ayachit @phismith

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Looks like the classroom tutorial in the documentation already addresses most of the items: Classroom Tutorials — ParaView Documentation 5.11.0 documentation

What would be the added value of the “Continuing with ParaView” document compared to the tutorial? Maybe a shorter document?

Best,
François

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François,
Spectacular question. Open the Getting Started two page .pdf and the Self Directed totorial .pdf. The first is a 10 minute starting guide for ParaView, the other is a multiple hour deep dive. I see this second document as a 15 minute, 4 page .pdf follow on to the getting started guide, where the classroom tutorials are an overwhelming 9 hour class (and documentation for same.) The document I propose would give you a further 5,000 meter view of ParaView, as opposed to a 1 cm view found in the classroom tutorials.

I am open to the community deciding “that’s a dumb idea”, so feel free to state opinions.

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I think this is definitely worth it. Why not adding it directly to the getting started ? Does it need to be a second document ?

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Adding it to Getting Started is my preference.

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The concern with adding it directly to Getting Started is that the longer Getting Started is, the less likely new users are to go through the instructions to get the basics. Going through the current 2-page Getting Started is such low commitment that anyone is likely to try it. A 2-page Getting Started and then 4-page “Next Steps” fell like nice stepping stones to the longer tutorials or user’s guide.

I think expanding the Getting Started a bit would be OK. My gut says to go no more than 4 pages.

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My thoughts were exactly what Ken stated. I was at Supercomputing talking to a researcher once ( Lavanya Ramakrishnan), and she actually did run a trial with a bunch of volunteers looking at how easy (or not) ParaView was to learn, and how clear the documentation was. She chose the Getting Started guide as it was simple, clear and short. I don’t think we want to mess with that.

After reading Getting Started, where does a user go next? The multiple hour tutorials? The users guide? I think it would be nice to have a document that would take 15 or 20 minutes to further give a high level tour of ParaView’s rich feature set.

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