|  | Ferret support - How to get the help you needOur goal is to support Ferret to the best of our abilities, within
      the constraints of our budgets and other commitments. Since
      Ferret is no-cost "freeware", and we are not funded
      to provide support outside of our own Laboratory, we need to
      enlist your help to make the effort successful. If Ferret users
      will try to follow the recommendations below, community-wide
      support will continue to work well.
 
        Consult the on-line documentation
        
          Ferret
          User's Guide and its extensive index
          Consult PLOT+ graphics references 
		     
		     Ferret Users Manual Chapter 6 shows how to call PPL commands from FerretThe PLOT+ Users Guide (Appendix B of the Ferret Users Guide) PLOT+ Enhancements Users Guide (Appendix C of the Ferret Users Guide)Consult Ferret demonstrations
          and tutorials
          Consult release
          notes and other documents
		  (For questions or suggestions about the documentation itself, 
		  email the Users Guide contact at 
oar.pmel.ferret-ug@noaa.gov
 ) 
        Consult the Frequently Asked
        Questions 
 
Consult the searchable ferret_users
        email archive to see if this question has been raised and
        answered before
 
Use the ferret_users
        email list to post your question -- an active community of
        highly skilled Ferret users is available to help answer your
        questions
        
          Consider in advance how to make your question intelligible
          to an audience unfamiliar with your work
          If you post a question and receive an answer in private
          emails, please post a brief summary of the solution to ferret_users
          so that others can see the solution to the question you raised
          and so that the email archive contains the solution to your question
         
If, while running Ferret, you encounter an outright crash
        (that is, a core dump -- not just an error message after which
        Ferret continues to be running), please notify us at 
        
        Ferret developers.
        We need to know of these problems in order to fix them.
 
If you need (as a last resort!) to direct
        a question to the ferret developers directly, please be prepared
        to
        
          Always tell us
          
            the operating system that you are running on (paste the output
            of the Unix command "uname -a" into your message);
            and
            the version of Ferret that you are running (paste the lines
            Ferret emits as it starts up)
          Reduce your question to its simplest form
          
            if your problem occurs in the midst of a long and complex
            script, try to reduce the script to its bare essence demonstrating
            the problem
            if your problem requires specific data files to be demonstrated
            
              try to demonstrate it using data files that are routinely
              distributed with Ferret (use "ls $FER_DSETS/data to see
              which these data sets are); if you cannot, then
              try to demonstrate it with data sets that are small. This
              may involve using Ferret to create reduced-sized data sets (typically
              using the SAVE command)
            If we will need to reproduce the problem in order to debug
          it, please be prepared to upload your scripts and data files
          to our ftp site -- ftp.ferret.noaa.gov, directory incoming/ferret,
          and let us know that you have done so by email
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