What's all this?

(Adam Lyon, October 2015)

The intention of this site/document it to kick-start use of ParaView in High Energy Physics. ParaView is not well known in the HEP community and much of the existing documentation, though very useful, is not geared for HEP use cases. I hope that others, with the help of information here, can get started in ParaView as quickly as possible.

How to contribute

This site/document is put together with the MkDocs system and written in MarkDown. MarkDown is a text based markup language that is heavily used and quite easy.

I hope that others will contribute information that is relevant to the ParaView HEP community in this document.

If you want to contribute, look at the source in GitHub, especially under the docs directory. If you have a Mac, the open-source MacDown program is especially nice for writing MarkDown (it shows you a continuously updated preview of your work). There is a newer program called Mou that looks very nice. It is in beta and I think will cost money when they have a first release. I use MacDown.

The mkdocs.yml file describes the structure of the site/document. Feel free to add stuff where you see fit.

If you change a file or add a new one, I would appreciate it if you could add your name to the author list (usually at the top of the file or the main heading), add the date (month & year are fine), and the version of ParaView or other programs that you are using. See examples throughout the documentation here.

Releasing your changes

Right now I control the releases of this documentation and it lives under my github account. If it becomes more popular and there are others who want to manage it, I'd be happy to move it to a community site (maybe something under the HEP Software Foundation). But for now, you need to talk to me.

You have three options for making your changes available.

  1. Open a New Issue and attach the files you've changed. I will incorporate them.

  2. Gain access to the Github repository and make the changes yourself. Open a New Issue and ask that I add you to the list of contributors.

  3. Do it the "Github way", which is you fork the repository, make your changes, and issue a pull request to me.

Option 3 is the best. You don't need MkDocs to edit or add text, but it comes in handy if you want to preview your work (and you don't use something like MacDown).

Watching for new updates

You can "watch" the repository from your GitHub account. From your profile, you can specify how you want to be notified if there are updates.