[vtkusers] Examples organization for multiple languages

[David Doria]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 4:34 AM, Anders Wallin
<anders.e.e.wallin at gmail.com> wrote:
> In addition to code I think it would be helpful to show rendered
> scenes as well as a graph of the rendering pipeline.
>
> Is there an example which shows how to render a pipeline?
>
> Adding screenshots and pipeline-graph-images to the wiki manually
> would be quite laborious. Could it be automated somehow so that each
> example contains three files:
> example.py (code)
> example.png (render screenshot)
> example-pipeline.png (pipeline graph)
> which is then compiled in to a wiki-page or a pdf-manual or something.
>
> this kind of "VTK-by-example" documentation would be great I think!
>
> AW

Anders,

Screenshots are on the todo list. The first thing that is being done
(Aashish is looking into it) is automatically pulling the cvs example
code as the content for the wiki pages. This way they are regression
tested (Bill developed a testing framework). Once this is working, as
you say, we should have the image with some standardized name be
displayed as a screenshot.

I'm not aware of any way to render a pipeline, it seems like a
reasonable thing for a visualization toolkit to do though :). If
anyone knows, let us know and we'll experiment. I'm not sure if ALL of
the examples would need it, but for some of the more complex ones it
could be useful.

At the beginning of this "make lots of examples" process, I considered
making a "VTK Software Guide" (stolen from the ITK idea). The problem
was, once I realized how big of a project this was, I was looking for
lots of people to contribute, and a PDF is a pretty hard way to
collaborate/share the work load. The wiki seemed reasonable. Then it
will be easy to once in a while go through and move new submissions
into the cvs.

Thanks,

David