Latest PDF3D PV+ Release Broadens Scientific Data Reporting

London, UK, 9 September 2018 – Just a short time after Kitware announced the release of the latest version of their ParaView™ software, which adds some great new features to this already very powerful software, PDF3D is pleased to announce the availability of a new version of its PV+ software (v2.16) built on this new ParaView (5.5.2) release.

PV+ v2.16 is currently available in both Windows and Linux 64-bit versions. This latest PV+ release coincides with the PDF3D v2.16 release for summer 2018, bringing the full PDF3D product suite up to date.

PV+ is used in industry for computer-aided engineering (CAE) result reporting, such as mechanical stress analysis (FEA), deformations, material science, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) including for models such as OpenFOAM and TELEMAC, and biophysics. As PV+ also includes a number of earth-science and geospatial data formats, civil engineers find it helpful for large-scale survey data, marine-environmental studies, and underground geophysical data reporting.

ParaView is an award winning open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization software package designed “to analyze extremely large datasets using distributed memory computing resources”.

According to Kitware ParaView “can be run on supercomputers to analyze datasets of petascale size as well as on laptops for smaller data, and has become an integral tool in many national laboratories, universities and industry”.

PDF3D’s PV+ software adds native integration of PDF3D’s powerful 3D PDF tools with ParaView as well as a number of additional processing tools and the ability to process a range of additional data formats not supported in native ParaView. Rebuilt directly from Kitware’s open source ParaView source code PDF3D’s additional functionality is fully integrated into the original code – it’s not just a plug-in. VSTL CEO Ian Curington commented “Through working closely with our demanding commercial clients, just creating a quick and simple PDF exporting plugin was never going to be enough. Over many years, we’ve taken the extra steps to make sure it’s fully integrated into the ParaView menus systems, captures many of the subtleties of the ParaView scenes, and keeps up with the latest platform changes, maintaining a high-quality reporting pathway.”

The integration of PDF3D’s powerful 3D PDF technology enables users to generate high quality 2D and 3D static and interactive PDF documents directly from the software interface. This new version adds the ability to use MS-Word to create custom layouts with 3D view and legends. When you might have spent months analysing complex datasets PV+ offers a way to be able to easily share results and analysis in powerful and compelling ways, via the ubiquitous PDF file format, with anyone who has Adobe’s feely available Acrobat reader software.

PV+ users with even more sophisticated requirements can take advantage of the new menu systems for adding PDF embedded JavaScript to create advanced interactive 3D PDFs to further enhance their data visualizations.

PV+ not only supports 2D and 3D graphical outputs and spreadsheet views, it also supports multiple views on a single page (including the ability to link cameras between views). Moving through transient time-dependent data, full or partial sequences are captured in the PDF for off-line playback.

And because PV+ is re-built from the ground up all this powerful new functionality is not only accessible from within the standard interfaces and menu systems it can be programmed and scripted just like other native ParaView functions.

PV+ adds functionality including revised “pvpython” scripting examples showing off a rich variety of scripted batch 3D PDF generation using the popular Python language integrated inside the PV+ package. It adds support for some key file formats to ParaView’s already extensive range of file I/O capabilities including additional data loaders/exporters and some that are not enabled by default, such as SEG-Y, Georeferenced-Images (GeoTIFF), TELEMAC Selefin, ESRI ArcGIS grids, Zycor-ZMap grids, GoCAD surfaces, ArcGIS ShapeFiles and COMSOL data.

PV+ is built on VSTL’s visualisation expertise and long experience of working with and supporting researchers within a broad range of commercial and academic fields. As well as offering the PV+ software VSTL can offer custom development, working with client’s domain experts, to support specialist technical requirements.