X11 plotting is unreliable (requires installing something non-obvious) on anything but Linux. I use it in live demos, but it's so limited I wouldn't recommend it to users. VTK is more discoverable/explorable for users; install a binary and make all the plots they want.
Patrick Sanan via petsc-dev <petsc-dev@mcs.anl.gov> writes: > This came up in the beginner's working group meeting. We all seemed to > agree that a very powerful thing for beginners is to be able to run a set > of well-defined instructions to go from 0 to being able to solve and > visualize a simple problem (I'm imagining a PDE on a 2D spatial domain). > > PETSc itself isn't a visualization library, obviously, so there are many > ways to visualize data but most involve some external tools. We'd be > interested in opinions on what we should recommend to beginners, for > example one or more of: > - Dump binary, load into MATLAB/Octave/Python+numpy+matplotlib > - Dump something which Paraview and/or VisIt can open > - Use PETSc's native drawing (X window) capabilities > - Include custom script for the tutorials, say which requires libpng and > produces an image > - ASCII art