I’d like to be able to store and display free-form text labels for points/cells. Is this possible in ParaView?
I’ve seen some examples that utilize vtkStringArray’s, but can’t find any documentation about how to store them in VTK files or how to render in ParaView.
Any pointers to examples would be appreciated!
Welcome to ParaView, @vadimcn!
In ParaView 5.8.0, you can create Text sources that are anchored to particular xyz locations. See https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/blob/master/Documentation/release/ParaView-5.8.0.md#new-billboard-and-flagpole-mode-for-text-source for details.
Thanks for the suggestion, however it seems that Text source gives me only a single annotation per plot. I would like to display annotations for each point or cell (ideally, sparsified when the view is zoomed out).
Also, as I mentioned, it is not clear to me how to store text strings in .vtk dataset files (the strings are free-form and cannot be derived from numeric arrays).
You can mostly do this with the Selection Display Inspector (available under the view menu), but it requires that you select points or cells first. Then you can label the selected points/cells with data array values. The labels won’t be sparsified as you zoom, out though, so it’s not exactly what you are requesting.
It may be the case that .vtk (the so-called legacy format) supports string arrays. The XML file formats, do, though.
I know this is an old post but an easier way to visualise the points/cells labels is using “Find Data” option in “View” Toolbar. You can extract the points/cells and then export as desired.