[Paraview] Probe just made a little bit easier

[Jean M. Favre]

Someone recently made suggestions for improvements of the Probe filter 
in his wish-list. I also checked bug #492, and paraView 1.4 does not 
quite answer these problems.

The biggest pain, is that Probe plots *all* variables and auto-scaling 
can make it impossible to look at your data in range [0-1] when you have 
another field in range [1e6-1e9].

To overcome this, I wrote a converter which takes as input the 
XMLPolyData file saved when selecting the Probe filter in "Line mode" 
and using "save data". The data is saved in binary with no option to 
switch to ASCII, so that is also hard on my eyesight.

My converter reads the XML PolyData and outputs ASCII data fit for Grace 
in NXY format. It also creates the small parameter file for the legend 
of each sets. I use Grace-5.1.14.

Take the RectGrid2.vtk example file, do a line probe, save the data.
The converters creates the following parameter file:

title "Title"
subtitle "Title"
s0 legend "scalars"
s1 legend "vectors_0"
s2 legend "vectors_1"
s3 legend "vectors_2"

and saves your data in Grace NXY format. You don't have to be an expert 
user of Grace (I started 2 hours ago) to learn to turn each plot on/off, 
and make nice-looking graphs.

I thought the converter would be useful to the ParaView community. It is 
available in source code, with the accompanying CmakeList.txt.

Drop me a note if you are interested. The code is 2 hours old, I am sure 
other users can contribute their 2cents to help improve it.

Jean

-- 
Dr. Jean M. Favre,                            email:favre  at  cscs.ch
http://www.cscs.ch/about/Favre.php
CSCS, Swiss Center for Scientific Computing | Tel:  +41 (91) 610.82.40
Via Cantonale, 6928 Manno, Switzerland      | Fax:  +41 (91) 610.82.82