About this Guide
About this Guide
This guide is meant to provide a hands-on tutorial of Partiview for users of all levels. We have tried to balance the ease of explanation with a level of technical detail. The chapters are organized in the following way.
- Introduction (the chapter you're currently reading) will introduce you to Partiview, describing its origins, distribution license, and support policies.
- Installing and Testing Partiview describes how to install and test Partiview on your system.
- Using Partiview provides extensive, step-by-step tutorials on Partiview using several data sets as examples. This chapter is meant to be read while you are using the Partiview software.
- Reference lists the Partiview keyboard shortcuts and useful Partiview commands.
We use a typographical convention in this document which follows these rules:
- typewriter font is used for items that are issued to or returned from the computer, including file listings.
- bold sans serif font is used for Partiview commands.
- italic sans serif font represents Partiview command arguments.
- Square brackets ([ ]) denote optional commands or arguments (the brackets are never typed themselves). For example, the command cen[ter] may be issued by typing center or just cen.
- The [+,*,/] argument signifies that the command may be scaled by adding a constant value, or by multiplying or dividing the current value by a constant.
- The | symbol represents the word ‘or,’ meaning one option or another may be used, but not both. For example, the clip box command has the form clipbox [on | off | hide] | [boxparameters]. You can either use cb on, cb off, cb hide, or cb 0,0,0 10,10,10. You cannot use two of these arguments, like this command cb hide 0,0,0 10,10,10 (wrong!).
We have created the Partiview User's Guide Data which includes several data sets that have been designed to accompany this guide. These include:
- Test Data
- The least complicated data set, only the bare essentials are included here for testing purposes.
- Complex Data
- A complex version of the Test Data where we have added data variables and many additional settings and attributes to the test data.
- Sample Data
- A sampled data set of about 10,000 particles in a spherical distribution. This data set is mainly useful when talking about statistical operations and other commands that act on large numbers of particles.
© 2002-2005 American Museum of Natural History
Last Modified: 2006-04-28 by Brian Abbott