Quick Start

This page gives you an introduction on how to get started with PyTecplot. For installation and system requirements, see the installation instructions.

Please refer to the Installation file for installation instructions and environment setup. The short of it is something like this:

pip install pytecplot

Linux and OSX users will have to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH respectively to the directory containing the Tecplot 360 EX executable. For OSX, this will be something like:

"/Applications/Tecplot 360 EX/Tecplot 360 EX.app/Contents/MacOS"

Hello World

Here is a simple PyTecplot script which creates a simple plot with some text and export an image of that plot. Note that the Tecplot 360 EX License is acquired automatically on the first call into the PyTecplot API:

import tecplot

frame = tecplot.active_frame()
frame.add_text('Hello, World!', position=(36, 50), size=34)
tecplot.export.save_png('hello_world.png', 600)

After running this script, you should have a PNG image like this:

_images/hello_world.png

Macro Integration

All macro commands can be executed from an active PyTecplot session. This means you may wrap all of your existing macro commands into a python script and one-by-one move the commands into native Python code. The “Hello, World!” example above could have been written like this:

>>> import tecplot
>>> tecplot.macro.execute_command(r'''
...   $!ATTACHTEXT
...     ANCHORPOS { X = 35 Y = 50 }
...     TEXTSHAPE { HEIGHT = 35 }
...     TEXT = 'Hello, World!'
...   $!EXPORTSETUP EXPORTFNAME = 'hello_world.png'
...   $!EXPORT
...     EXPORTREGION = CURRENTFRAME
... ''')

We could pull out just the image creation part into Python by writing this:

>>> import tecplot
>>> tecplot.macro.execute_command(r'''
...   $!ATTACHTEXT
...     ANCHORPOS { X = 35 Y = 50 }
...     TEXTSHAPE { HEIGHT = 35 }
...     TEXT = 'Hello, World!'
... ''')
>>> tecplot.export.save_png('hello_world.png', 600)

For more information, see the tecplot.macro reference documentation.

Getting Help

Examples can be found in the examples directory and the primary documentation (in HTML format) can found under the docs directory:

docs/builds/html/index.html

It is generated directly from the source code under pytecplot/tecplot. In addition, all imported objects and methods that are part of the public API have doc strings which can be accessed with python’s native help() function. Additionally, users are encouraged to contact support@tecplot.com for any questions they may have.