You may use either upper or lower case letters. See the manual if you are interested in the shortcuts. Spaces and blank lines are ignored by Tecplot and there are some short cuts that will eliminate a line or two from the header. You may use your favorite editor to add the headers to your data. Structured Data Structured data may be either 1, 2 or 3 dimensional. Your progams should call FORTRAN or C functions supplied by Tecplot to write the data. Tecplot can read binary files that have been created by 'preplot' or created by your programs. These are ascii files that tecplot converts to binary using a program called 'preplot'. Tecplot uses the number of values on the first row to determine how many variables there are.Tecplot Data Formats Tecplot can read in several data formats, including structured, unstructured or one dimensional(for Graphs). You can change this from within Tecplot once the data is loaded. Tecplot will assume that the first variable is the X coordinate, the second the Y coordinate, and If your data is a simple plot, then you need only have it in a file with the values seperated by spaces or linebreaks. More information on preplot can be found in section 7.1 of the Tecplot manual. If you are going to be using the same set of data more than once or twice, it is probably best to run preplot so that you can load it more quickly.

You can create a binary file from an ASCII file by running the program preplot on your data. Tecplot can either read ASCII (text) data files or data files in a Tecplot specific binary format. There, input files are gone over in more detail. If you are going to be loading in more than a few variables, or want to create a complex plot, then you are strongly encouraged to read chapter 6 of the Tecplot manual, available in the Barker Library stacks. However, it needs to have a fairly strictly formatted input file. Tecplot can handle very complex input data.

Tecplot data format