Thanks for suggesting PyGmsh! I bumped into it a while ago but never really figured it out. Now I'm keen since it should help building and modifying meshes more easily. I installed pygmsh easily using the instructions on the website. It imports correctly. There is even an example that builds a circle, I think. When I try running this, as well as other examples, I get an error because no module named vtk is found. See below. I get this comes from meshio? Traceback (most recent call last): File "circle.py", line 24, in <module> meshio.write('circle.vtu', *out) File "/home/fpoulin/software/firedrake/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/meshio/__init__.py", line 187, in write field_data=field_data File "/home/fpoulin/software/firedrake/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/meshio/vtk_io.py", line 204, in write import vtk ImportError: No module named vtk When I do a pip install it tells me that it is already installed and up to date. (firedrake) fpoulin@fpoulin-Gazelle:~/software/pygmsh/test/examples$ pip install -U meshio Requirement already up-to-date: meshio in /home/fpoulin/software/firedrake/lib/python2.7/site-packages Requirement already up-to-date: pipdated in /home/fpoulin/software/firedrake/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from meshio) Requirement already up-to-date: numpy in /home/fpoulin/software/firedrake/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from meshio) Requirement already up-to-date: requests in /home/fpoulin/software/firedrake/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from pipdated->meshio) Requirement already up-to-date: appdirs in /home/fpoulin/software/firedrake/lib/python2.7/site-packages (from pipdated->meshio) I realize this isn't necessarily a firedrake question but if anyone had an idea on how to get this working I would be keen to try it. Cheers, Francis ------------------ Francis Poulin Associate Professor Department of Applied Mathematics University of Waterloo email: fpoulin@uwaterloo.ca Web: https://uwaterloo.ca/poulin-research-group/ Telephone: +1 519 888 4567 x32637 ________________________________ From: firedrake-bounces@imperial.ac.uk [firedrake-bounces@imperial.ac.uk] on behalf of G. D. McBain [gdmcbain@protonmail.com] Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2017 6:16 PM To: firedrake@imperial.ac.uk Subject: Re: [firedrake] circles in firedrake? I would expect a user to run gmsh separately (at the command line or through the GUI), rather than from within the Python script. I don't think it's possible to interact with gmsh from Python nowadays without jumping through considerable hoops. Have you tried the (free third-party) PyGmsh? It generates .geo code from Python. From there one calls Gmsh using Python subprocess and reads in the resulting .msh. I've found it handy. https://github.com/nschloe/pygmsh