Getting started with pyvtk

[Peter Pearson]

I'm trying to get started with pyvtk, the Python interface
to the Visualization Toolkit, but there's obviously
something important that I haven't figured out after an
embarrassingly long morning of googling around.  When I run
sample pyvtk code (example1.py, from
http://cens.ioc.ee/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/python/pyvtk/examples/example1.py),
nothing graphical happens, but some text files appear named
example1.vtk and example1b.vtk.  Guessing that I need to
feed one of these to vtk, I tried "vtk <example1.vtk" and
"vtk example1.vtk", but those result in (different) error
messages that I think mean example1.vtk is not the language
that vtk expects.  Simply running "vtk" (apparently 4.0)
gets a prompt that has no help command, and "man vtk" just
tells me it's like "wish", and "man wish" doesn't address
what to do with a vtk file.

What key piece am I missing?

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