Adding a section to the manual#

Then you have to decide if the cookbook you want to contribute is a Simple setup (that explains how to use one specific feature, but does not try to reproduce any earth-like setting, see Simple setups), a Geophysical setup (that teaches how to setup a specific type of geodynamic model like a global convection model, a subduction zone or a mid-ocean ridge, see Geophysical setups) or a Benchmark (see Benchmarks). Depending on that choice, you will add a new entry to the toctree of the corresponding .md file in the doc/sphinx/user directory: either cookbooks/simple-setups.md, cookbooks/geophysical-setups.md, or benchmarks/index.md. Your toctree entry should follow the structure cookbooks/YOUR-COOKBOOK-NAME/doc/YOUR-COOKBOOK-NAME.md or benchmarks/YOUR-COOKBOOK-NAME/doc/YOUR-COOKBOOK-NAME.md depending on which top-level directory your cookbook is going in (see the other toctree entries for examples).

Now that it has a place to live in the manual, you will need to actually create the documentation, in the form of a .md file in the aspect/cookbooks/YOUR-COOKBOOK-NAME/doc/ directory (replace /cookbooks/ with /benchmarks/ if applicable). The format in which cookbook documentation (and the rest of the manual) needs to be written is MyST, a flavor of markdown. For your convenience, we provide a MyST Quick reference containing all the proper formatting for tables, figures, math, citations, etc. You can also refer to the documentation of an existing cookbook, such as 2D compressible convection with a reference profile and material properties from BurnMan or Simple convection in a quarter of a 2d annulus, for examples of how to format your own documentation. Your documentation should follow this general structure:

  • Start with a short description of what feature the cookbook introduces or what the model setup is meant to accomplish, including the relevant physics. Specifically, this paragraph should also address the question of what motivates the model. If the setup comes from a publication, make sure to mention that and include the reference (see the MyST Quick reference for proper citation formatting).

  • If the model uses a new plugin, describe the new feature this plugin introduces and how this is implemented in the code. Ideally, this paragraph includes essential code snippets from the plugin file that complement and illustrate the description in the text. Place the code snippet in the same directory as your .md file and see Codeblocks from external files for how to reference it.

  • Explain what the important input parameters in this setup are, what values you set them to and why. This paragraph should give an overview of your model setup, including the initial conditions, boundary conditions, geometry, etc., and anything that is special about the setup. Ideally, this description includes snippets from the input file; include them the same way you included the code snippets above.

  • Show the model results in form of figures and/or plots, accompanied by an explanation of what happens in the model. This can also include a link to an animation of the model you made and uploaded somewhere, for example on YouTube. When creating figures or animations, you should think about the color scale that you use. Some colormaps – like the rainbow color palette that is still the default in some visualization tools – can obscure features present in the data and introduce artifacts because the rainbow color scale is not perceptually uniform. For more background on this topic, start here https://matplotlib.org/2.0.2/users/colormaps.html. To state some of their recommendations here, in most cases it is best to choose a perceptually uniform color palette. For representing information that has ordering, they recommend sequential color palettes that change in lightness/color incrementally like “viridis,” “inferno,” “plasma” and “magma.” For representing data that deviates around zero, they recommend diverging color palettes where two different colors change in lightness and meet at an unsaturated color in the middle such as “BrBG” and “RdBu.” If you use a recent version of ParaView or VisIt, these color palettes are included with the preset color maps under the names given above, and you may want to choose one of these options rather than the default.

  • Finally, mention some ways the users could modify or extend the cookbook, such as parameters to vary to get new and interesting results, or to better understand the numerical methods or the physical processes occurring in the model. These can just be suggestions, or you can also extend on these ideas by adding subsections that illustrate how these modifications influence the model results.

And that’s it, you have just created your first cookbook! Make a pull request to contribute it to the main repository! You can find more information on how to do that on our github page. Once the pull request is submitted, you can preview what your page will look like in rendered form by scrolling to the checks near the bottom of the open pull request and clicking Details next to docs/readthedocs.org:aspect-documentation. The documentation takes a few minutes to build; once done, you will be able to browse a preview of what the manual will look like once your additions are merged. Navigate to your newly-added page and use this opportunity to ensure all equations, citations, figures, etc. are formatted correctly and appear as you would like.

You will get bonus points if you also create a test (see Writing tests) that only runs the first time step (or a lower resolution version) of your cookbook.