Running pyFormex

To run pyFormex, simply enter the command pyformex in a terminal window. This will start the Graphical User Interface (GUI), from where you can launch examples or load, edit and run your own scripts.

The installation procedure may have installed into your desktop menu or even have created a start button in the desktop panel. These provide convenient shortcuts to start the GUI by the click of a mouse button.

The program takes some optional command line arguments, that modify the behaviour of the program. Appendix Command line options gives a full list of all options. For normal use however you will seldom need to use any of them. Therefore, we will only explain here the more commonly used ones.

By default, sends diagnostical and informational messages to the terminal from which the program was started. Sometimes this may be inconvenient, e.g. because the user has no access to the starting terminal. You can redirect these messages to the message window of the GUI by starting pyformex with the command pyformex --redirect. The desktop starters installed by the installation procedure use this option.

In some cases the user may want to use the mathematical power of without the GUI. This is e.g. useful to run complex automated procedures from a script file. For convenience, will automatically enter this batch mode (without GUI) if the name of a script file was specified on the command line; when a script file name is absent, start in GUI mode. Even when specifying a script file, You can still force the GUI mode by adding the option –gui to the command line.

Command line options

The following is a complete list of the options for the pyformex command.This output can also be generated by the command pyformex --help.

Usage
=====
  pyformex [<options>] [[ scriptname [scriptargs]] ...]

pyFormex is a tool for generating, manipulating and transforming large
geometrical models of 3D structures by sequences of mathematical
transformations.

Options
=======
--gui               start the GUI (default if no scriptfile argument is given)
--nogui             do not load the GUI (default if a scriptfile argument is
                    given)
--interactive, -i   go into interactive mode after processing the command line
                    parameters. This is implied by the --gui option.
--force-dri         Force use of Direct Rendering
--force-nodri       Disables the Direct Rendering
--uselib            Use the pyFormex C lib if available. This is the default.
--nouselib          Do not use the pyFormex C-lib.
--safelib           Convert data types to match C-lib. This is the default.
--unsafelib         Do not convert data types to match C-lib. BEWARE: this may
                    make the C-lib calls impossible. Use only for debugging
                    purposes.
--fastencode        Use a fast algorithm to encode edges.
--config=CONFIG     Use file CONFIG for settings
--nodefaultconfig   Skip the default site and user config files. This option
                    can only be used in conjunction with the --config option.
--redirect          Redirect standard output to the message board (ignored
                    with --nogui)
--debug             display debugging info to sys.stdout
--debuglevel=DEBUG  display debugging info to sys.stdout
--test              testing mode: only for developers!
--testfpbug         testing mode: only for developers!
--testexecutor      test alternate executor: only for developers!
--remove            remove the pyformex installation and exit
--whereami          show where the pyformex package is installed and exit
--detect            show detected helper software and exit
--version           show program's version number and exit
--help, -h          show this help message and exit

Running without the GUI

If you start with the --nogui option, no Graphical User Interface is created. This is extremely useful to run automated scripts in batch mode. In this operating mode, will interprete all arguments remaining after interpreting the options, as filenames of scripts to be run (and possibly arguments to be interpreted by these scripts). Thus, if you want to run a script myscript.py in batch mode, just give the command pyformex myscript.py.

The running script has access to the remaining arguments in the global list variable argv. The script can use any arguments of it and pop them of the list. Any arguments remaining in the argv list when the script finishes, will be used for another execution cycle. This means that the first remaining argument should again be a script.