[Paraview] ParaView VTK Legacy File Questions

[Karl König]

Dan,

Apart from the quite large list of readers ParaView ships with (see
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Users_Guide/List_of_readers)
it is indeed possible to extend ParaView with custom readers, by using a
reader plugin or extending the ParaView source. You will need to compile
ParaView from source for that, though.
http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Writing_ParaView_Readers will provide
helpful information if you want to follow that path. The ParaView source
tree contains 4 reader plugins in subdirectory "Plugins" which may serve
as a template, too.

Probably easiest would be to tweak the ParaView sources directly and
then compile ParaView from those sources for the operating systems used
in your workgroup. You will have to edit the sources files in VTK/IO/Legacy.

I do not recommend this procedure, though, as it will require quite some
time and you would end up generating non-standard Legacy VTK files.
Files ParaView and other VTK based programs and scripts will not be able
to read by default. I'd go for the XML VTK ASCII formats instead, as
Mike suggested. You can put XML comments anywhere, except inside a
<DataArray>...</DataArray> pair. That should be sufficient.

Hope that helps
Karl