Goals

  1. Easier for users to find relevant info
    1. better organization of documentation
    2. easier search of all vapor documentation
    3. faster access
    4. cross referenced materials
  2. Easier for VAPOR team to maintain
    1. avoid duplication
    2. minimize screen shots (e.g. avoid documenting widgets on screen shots if tool tips built in to the GUI can be used)
    3. avoid embedded code examples (refer to code repository)
    4. easier to use, lighter weight documentation tools
    5. Web documentation should focus on things that can not easily be explained by tool tips & context sensitive help
  3. More comprehensive
    1. document complex features that are currently undocumented
  4. Modernize
    1. Make better use of web technologies (move away from M$ word authored pdfs)

Draft outline for Drupal site

  1. Getting Started (an overview of how to get started with vapor with links to more detailed topics)
  2. Data preparation (discusses how to prepare your data for vapor)
    1. Overview of VDC
    2. data preparation user guide (discuss several common cases and give examples)
    3. Reference manuals
      1. command line tools
      2. IDL language extensions
  3. Using vaporgui
    1. overview of application (needed?)
    2. advanced (hard to use) capabilities (e.g. flow)
    3. How to
      1. e.g. how do I make an animation?
  4. Developer info

Ideas to consider

Making use of video capture to document some aspects of GUI

reusing material for GUI context help and web site (e.g. providing links to web site within GUI)

Generating tutorials in the form of ppts so they can be reused for talks and are more likely to be kept up to date

Things we haven't considered

providing access to C++ API documentation (i.e. Doxygen doc)

GUI capabilities that we should invest the time in to simplify and reduce/eliminate documentation need

Links to user forum

Proposed Topic organization

Menu Items under "Documentation":

VAPOR Overview

Installation

Data Preparation

How-to guide

Developer information

Command-line tools

Tutorials (shorten, based on links into How-to guide)

FAQ (like we now have, but expanded and searchable)

Presentations

Each menu item above launches a page like the following, each of which has an expandable table of contents with links to other pages or animations.
VAPOR Overview
  • Components of VAPOR
  • What is a VDC
  • A high-level overview of vaporgui (e.g. Compression and Refinement Levels, panel layout, etc.)
Data Preparation 
  • VAPOR Data Collection (detailed description necessary for users to transform data)
  • Converting from raw data

            Converting from WRF data

            Converting from NetCDF files

            Preparing AMR data

            Preparing georeferenced images

Vapor GUI How-to guide

     Performing basic operations with the GUI:

                        User preferences

                        Context-sensitive help

                        Tooltips

                        Undo/Redo

                        Viewpoint selection and alignment

     Render in the 3D scene

                        Control multiple renderer instances

                        Controlling multiple visualizers using shared and local parameters

                        Use of refinement level and compression level

                        Using Manipulators

                        Navigate in the 3D scene

                        Edit a transfer function

                        Animation control

                        Visualizer features

                        Stretching the scene and WRF interpolation control

                        Volume Rendering

                        Isosurface rendering

                        Probe and contouring

                        Using terrain-mapped data

                        Image rendering – georeferenced image support

                        Using NCL plots in scene

                        2D Data rendering

                        Rendering 3D data below the terrain

                        Controlling lighting

                        using 2D and 3D cursors

            Flow

                        Controlling the appearance of flow lines

                        Methods for positioning seeds

                        Using the probe to specify seeds

                        Setting up  unsteady flow

                        Settign up field line advection

                        Image-based flow visualization

                        Positioning wind barbs

            Using the Probe/contour plane

                        Rotation and positioning in the scene

                        IBFV controls

            Reading and writing files

                        Using session files

                        using Preferences

                        Loading VDF files

                        Loading WRF data

                        Merging datasets

                        Saving current Metadata

                        Exporting to IDL

                        Capturing images of the 3D scene

                        Making animation sequences

                        Capturing flow sequences

                        Reading and writing transfer functions

                        Reading and writing region lists

                        Reading Tiffs

                        Capturing images from tabs

                        Reading and writing lists of seed points

            Derived variables

                        Using Python to derive variables

                        Using NCL to derive variables

                        Using IDL to derive variables

Developer info

            Extension developers guide

            Extension API (Doxygen)

            VDF API

            IDL API

  •             Python/Numpy API
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