MeshView

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MeshView is a rudimentary graphical interface for visualizing quadrilateral meshes generated by CQMesh and QMPP. MeshView was written in C++ and relies on X11 and OpenGL. The only feature provided (other than visualization of the mesh on the screen) is the option of saving an EPS file of the mesh currently seen on screen.

How to execute MeshView

MeshView is extremely simple to use. You just have to type
meshview input-mesh-filename
where
input-mesh-filename
is the name of the input files describing the quadrilateral mesh. MeshView requires three input files: a node, an edge, and an element file, all of which have the same name, but their extensions are .node, .edge and .ele, respectively. For instance,
meshview quad-mesh
causes
meshview
to read in
quad-mesh.node, quad-mesh.edge, and quad-mesh.ele.
A .node file contains information about the vertices of a triangular mesh, a .edge file contains information about the edges of a triangular mesh, and a .ele file contains information about the triangles of a triangular mesh. You can find more details about the format of these three types in the home page of the software Triangle, which is a public domain application for generating triangle meshes of planar polygonal domains. To generate an EPS file from MeshView, place your mouse cursor inside the MeshView visualization window, and press and hold the secondary button of your mouse to access a pop-up menu. Next, choose the option "Generate an EPS file".

Portability

MeshView was developed for Unix-based systems. It relies on standard features of C++, CGAL, GMP, X11, and OpenGL. As far as I know, all those components are available for PCs running Linux or Mac OS X. However, I've never tried to port MeshView to Windows. While this should be possible, please do not ask me to do it for you.

Download

Get a ZIP file.

Compilation and instalation

In order to install MeshView, you will need you will need to have a Unix-based system (Linux or Mac OS X will do) with X11 and OpenGL installed. To compile the code, uncompress the tar ball, enter directory MakeView, edit the file makefile to modify the X11, OpenGL, CGAL and GMP paths (if needed), and run make. If everything goes well, you should see the executable meshview in the subdirectory bin. Last time I compiled MeshView, I used g++ 4.2.1. There are newer versions of g++ but you should have no problem compiling my code as it is based on plain features of C++ only. However, if you do run into problems, please let me know anyway.

Last update

MeshView was last updated on April 22, 2010.

Last update: March 27, 2016