Introduction

Many of the example figures in the Smokeview user's guide are now generated automatically using the new scripting feature in Smokeview. This allows the manuals to be updated easily as Smokeview, FDS and/or the underlying FDS cases are updated. A Smokeview script consists of a series of commands to load data files, set viewpoints, set time and render image files. The script may be generated using Smokeview's script recorder option and then customized using a text editor. The script commands are described in the Smokeview user's guide.

Steps to Generating Figures

The steps below are written for creating Smokeview User Guide figures. The steps will be similar for other guides as they begin to use this method.

1. Update the FDS/Smokeview svn repository to latest revision number.
2. Obtain the latest version of Smokeview at http://code.google.com/p/fds-smv/downloads/list
3. To run the cases, go to the "repository_root/Manuals/SMV_5_User_Guide" directory. On a Unix system run the script run_cases.csh, on a PC system run the script run_cases.bat . All cases except the thouse5 complete pretty quickly. The figure generating scripts may be run after the thouse5 case get past 60 seconds.
4. To create the figures, again go to the "repository_root/Manuals/SMV_5_User_Guide" directory. On a Windows computer double click on the batch file: make_figures.bat . On a Linux or Mac OSX computer, run make_figures.csh after first editing the .csh file to define the location of Smokeview. For each set of figures, you should see Smokeview start up and generate a series of image files. Smokeview will shut down automatically.
5. pdflatex the user's guide .tex file . If everything goes well you should not see any latex errors regarding missing figure files.