Hello,
I am currently working with some older PFC command files (likely written for version 2 or 3), but they are not functioning properly in PFC 9. For example, commands such as:
plot add ball outline off blue
plot add pbond black
plot add fish crk_item
return errors like “bad conversion of parameter (add)” when I try to compile them.
I would greatly appreciate your guidance on how to update these commands to the correct PFC 9 syntax, or advice on how to efficiently find the equivalent commands in the PFC 9 manual. This would be a great help for me to move forward with my work.
Thank you very much for your time and support.
Best regards,
Alaa
Dear Alaa, Wow, you have a very, very, very, very old version of PFC. PFC was released in 1995, and version 4 was from 2008, so 2-3 is older than that. The commands create “plots” that contain plot items that allow one to visualize the model. {plot ball} refers to what we call the Ball Plot Item. {plot pbond} refers to what used to be called the parllel-bond plot item, but is not part of the Contact Plot Item. {plot add fish} refers to adding a FISH plot item with the ability to visualize cracks — see the material modeling support package for the modern capability {Material-Modeling Support for PFC | US Minneapolis - Itasca Consulting Group, Inc.}. The user interface for version 9 is vastly different than that of versions 2 and 3. The plotting is done by interactively creating plots, and commands are typically not used to do this.The plotting is described at { Plotting — Itasca Software 9.0 documentation }. Cheers, David Potyondy.
Dear David,
Thank you for your reply and for sharing the resources. I am currently facing some difficulties in working with PFC commands, and I think I don’t fully understand how to use the commands explained in the documentation. I was wondering if there are any workshops or webinars available that could help me better understand how to use them.
The main challenge is that I have a set of scripts that are highly relevant to my work, but they are quite old, as you mentioned. I would like to know if there is a way to update these scripts so that I can use them with PFC version 9.
I would greatly appreciate your guidance on this.
Best regards,
You need to learn how to use PFC v9. The command structure, and entire program interface, was drastically changed in version 5. There is no simple mapping between scripts from before and after this, although anything that could be done in the old (before v5) PFC can also be done in the new (after v5) PFC — no functionality was lost.
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