1/6/25, 12:25 AM Printing Results

ANSYS BASIC INTERMEDIATE ADVANCED POSTPROC. COMMAND PRINTABLE

UofA ANSYS Tutorial
UTILITIES TUTORIALS TUTORIALS TUTORIALS TUTORIALS LINE FILES VERSION

Introduction

Starting up ANSYS
Printing and Plotting ANSYS Results to a File
ANSYS Environment

ANSYS Interface Printing Text Results to a File

Convergence Testing
ANSYS produces lists and tables of many types of results that are normally displayed on the screen.
Saving/Restoring Jobs However, it is often desired to save the results to a file to be later analyzed or included in a report.
ANSYS Files
1. Stresses: instead of using 'Plot Results' to plot the stresses, choose 'List Results'. Select 'Elem
Printing Results Table Data', and choose what you want to list from the menu. You can pick multiple items. When
the list appears on the screen in its own window, Select 'File'/'Save As...' and give a file name to
Working with Pro/E store the results.
2. Any other solutions can be done in the same way. For example select 'Nodal Solution' from the
'List Results' menu, to get displacements.
Index 3. Preprocessing and Solution data can be listed and saved from the 'List' menu in the 'Utility Menu
bar'. Save the resulting list in the same way described above.

Contributions
Plotting of Figures
Comments
There are two major routes to get hardcopies from ANSYS. The first is a quick a raster-based screen
MecE 563
dump, while the second is a scalable vector plot.
Mechanical Engineering
1.0 Quick Image Save
University of Alberta

When you want to quickly save an image of the entire screen or the current 'Graphics window', select:
ANSYS Inc. 'Utility menu bar'/'PlotCtrls'/'Hard Copy ...'.
In the window that appears, you will normally want to select 'Graphics window', 'Monochrome',
'Reverse Video', 'Landscape' and 'Save to:'.
Then enter the file name of your choice.
Copyright © 2001 Press 'OK'
University of Alberta
This raster image file may now be printed on a PostScript printer or included in a document.

2.0 Better Quality Plots

The second method of saving a plot is much more flexible, but takes a lot more work to set up as you'll
see...

Redirection

Normally all ANSYS plots are directed to the plot window on the screen. To save some plots to a file, to
be later printed or included in a document or what have you, you must first 'redirect' the plots to a file
by issuing:
'Utility menu bar'/'PlotCtrls'/'Redirect Plots'/'To File...'.

Type in a filename (e.g.: frame.pic) in the 'Selection' Window.

Now issue whatever plot commands you want within ANSYS, remembering that the plots will not be
displayed to the screen, but rather they will be written to the selected file. You can put as many plots as
you want into the plot file. When you are finished plotting what you want to the file, redirect plots back
to the screen using:

'Utility menu bar'/'PlotCtrls'/'Redirect Plots'/'To Screen'.

Display and Conversion

The plot file that has been saved is stored in a proprietary file format that must be converted into a more
common graphic file format like PostScript, or HPGL for example. This is performed by running a
separate program called display. To do this, you have a couple of options:

1. select display from the ANSYS launcher menu (if you started ANSYS that way)

file:///F:/Old Hard Drive/FEA/ANSYS/Alberta/Ansys Utilities/Printing Results.htm 1/3

1/6/25, 12:25 AM Printing Results
2. shut down ANSYS or open up a new terminal window and then type display at the Unix prompt.

Either way, a large graphics window will appear. Decrease the size of this window, because it most
likely covers the window in which you will enter the display plotting commands. Load your plot file
with the following command:
file,frame,pic

if your plot file is 'plots.pic'. Note that although the file is 'plots.pic' (with a period), Display wants
'plots,pic'(with a comma). You can display your plots to the graphics window by issuing the command
like
plot,n

where n is plot number. If you plotted 5 images to this file in ANSYS, then n could be any number from
1 to 5.

Now that the plots have been read in, they may be saved to printer files of various formats:

1. Colour PostScript: To save the images to a colour postscript file, enter the following commands
in display:
pscr,color,2
/show,pscr
plot,n

where n is the plot number, as above. You can plot as many images as you want to postscript files
in this manner. For subsequent plots, you only require the plot,n command as the other options
have now been set. Each image is plotted to a postscript file such as pscrxx.grph, where xx is a
number, starting at 00.

Note: when you import a postscript file into a word processor, the postscript image will appear as
blank box. The printer information is still present, but it can only be viewed when it's printed out
to a postscript printer.

Printing it out: Now that you've got your color postscript file, what are you going to do with it?
Take a look here for instructions on colour postscript printing at a couple of sites on campus
where you can have your beautiful stress plot plotted to paper, overheads or even posters!

2. Black & White PostScript: The above mentioned colour postscript files can get very large in
size and may not even print out on the postscript printer in the lab because it takes so long to
transfer the files to the printer and process them. A way around this is to print them out in a black
and white postscript format instead of colour; besides the colour specifications don't do any good
for the black and white lab printer anyways. To do this, you set the postscript color option to '3',
i.e. and then issue the other commands as before
pscr,color,3
/show,pscr
plot,n

Note: when you import a postscript file into a word processor, the postscript image will appear as
blank box. The printer information is still present, but it can only be viewed when it's printed out
to a postscript printer.

3. HPGL: The third commonly used printer format is HPGL, which stands for Hewlett Packard
Graphics Language. This is a compact vector format that has the advantage that when you import
a file of this type into a word processor, you can actually see the image in the word processor! To
use the HPGL format, issue the following commands:
/show,hpgl
plot,n

Final Steps

It is wise to rename these plot files as soon as you leave display, for display will overwrite the
files the next time it is run. You may want to rename the postscript files with an '.eps' extension to
indicate that they are encapsulated postscript images. In a similar way, the HPGL printer files
could be given an '.hpgl' extension. This renaming is done at the Unix commmand line (the 'mv'
command).

A list of all available display commands and their options may be obtained by typing:
help

file:///F:/Old Hard Drive/FEA/ANSYS/Alberta/Ansys Utilities/Printing Results.htm 2/3

1/6/25, 12:25 AM Printing Results
When complete, exit display by entering
finish

file:///F:/Old Hard Drive/FEA/ANSYS/Alberta/Ansys Utilities/Printing Results.htm 3/3