[Paraview] Omissions in VTK File Format Document

[Kent Eschenberg]

I use and refer others to the excellent summary at

   http://public.kitware.com/VTK/pdf/file-formats.pdf

but it needs an update.

One omission that took us a couple of days to understand concerns the "AppendedData" tag used with the XML formats. There is an undocumented encoding, "raw", that is quite useful except for a nasty surprise: each section of raw data must start with a
4-byte integer giving the number of bytes in that section. See

   vtkXMLDataParser::ReadUncompressedData

Also, though the "pvd" format is not officially VTK, it is closely associated with VTK so it would make sense to include it in this document (the book's definition doesn't include all of the newest options).

Kent 
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center