Conventions and formatting

General conventions

In this wiki, we use italic fonts to represent software components, options, and files, e.g. the configure script, the with_mpi option, or the src/21_hashfuncs/ directory. Commands entered by the user are usually wrapped in frames and use a fixed-space font, as follows:

../configure --enable-openmp --with-mpi="/usr/local"

The ~abinit keyword represents the top source directory of Abinit wherever it appears.

Tip: To be found more easily, tips, tricks, advice, and notes are written in yellow boxes with a light bulb on their left-hand side.

IMPORTANT: Essential information that you should read with good care is displayed in orange boxes with a warning sign on the left-hand side.

Interactive shell commands

Many examples described on this wiki assume that the user is using a terminal to interact with Abinit. A terminal is a text window running a shell, which is a program executing commands entered by the user. Please click on the links within this section, look at your operating system documentation, and/or look on the internet for "Opening a terminal" if you are not familiar with terminals and shells.

When describing interactive shell commands, we use the Bourne Shell conventions, since this is the most portable shell available and it is the one used by various components of Abinit. All commands entered by the user start with a dollar sign and a space character -- which should not be typed when you reproduce the examples on your own computer -- and their output is reproduced verbatim just below. In the following example:

$ cat abinit.in
ecut 12.0
znucl 1
acell 1.0 1.0 1.0
xred 0.0 0.0 0.0
...

the user types 'cat abinit.in' followed by the enter key, which displays the contents of the abinit.in file on the console.