Utility to plot toolpaths
Currently Truchas provides an option to write a plotfile of a toolpath. This makes for a rather awkward workflow, needing to run Truchas for a short time (at least through initialization) just to visualize the toolpath, especially while developing the toolpath. It also complicates the internal implementation with an arguably extraneous task. A better approach may be a small external utility that writes the plotfile.
But it's not obvious what the interface to the utility should look like because the "toolpath" isn't simply the external json file of path movements, but there are additional parameters included in the namelist such as scaling factors and initial position/time. Should those be defined by command line parameters? Or perhaps the utility input should be the namelist itself or a json version of it. One positive aspect of having Truchas write the plotfile is that one is assured it reflects exactly the toolpath Truchas is using, whereas with the external utility the user needs to ensure that the inputs are the same.