OOF: Finite Element Analysis of Microstructures
There's no point in telling you how to read this manual, since you'll do what you want anyway, and we'll never know. By the way, if you've read this far without starting to play with the program, we either admire you for being far more patient than any of us or we deride your sense of adventure.
To read this manual, you could adopt one of the following strategies:
- Impetuous
-
Skip the manual. Check out the ppm2oof options by typing ppm2oof -h. Find a ppm file somewhere or use our example file spinodal.ppm. Start the program by typing ppm2oof -file spinodal.ppm. Refer to Chapter 4. The ppm2oof menus when you get into trouble.
- Impatient
-
Run the provided script program with ppm2oof -file spinodal.ppm -start spinodal_select_1.log and watch carefully what happens and see if you understand it well enough to try it out on your own. Skip the manual, edit the script, use your own ppm-file and just get something to work. Go back to the manual when your optimistic hopes and plans have been dashed.
- Circumspect
- Obdurate
-
Read and memorize the whole manual cover to cover and skip the examples.
If we've done everything correctly, and if your browser [6] is cooperating, different typefaces in this manual mean different things.
Buttons in the graphical interface look like this: Quit.
Functions in menus look like this: ppmfile; and variables look like this: width.
Menu names look like this: initialize. Since menus can contain submenus a slash is used to separate the names of the submenus, with a leading slash indicating the main OOF menu. For example, /select/undo is the undo command in the select submenu of the main menu, and /adaptive_mesh/refine/all is the all function of the refine submenu of the adaptive_mesh menu.
Things that you type verbatim look like this: ppm2oof -file example.ppm. Things that you should replace with some other value when you type them, and things that are standing in for something that the computer will type look like this: filename. Things that the program types to you look like this: I'm sorry, Dave.
[6] If you're reading a print version of the manual, we apologize. You really ought to use the on-line version. It will be more up-to-date and is full of helpful hyperlinks.
