Skip to content

Preface

The FEBio User Manual is the practical guide to running FEBio: how to invoke it from the command line, how the free-format XML input file is structured, and how to set up multi-step analyses, restarts, parameter optimization, plugins, and configuration. It also documents FEBio's output — the binary plot database and the log/data records — in its appendices.

It sits between the other manuals: Theory explains the mathematics behind the models, Features is the per-feature parameter reference, and this manual covers how you actually drive the solver.

Use the User tab above to browse by chapter and section.

About this conversion

  • Source — source/FEBio_User_Manual.lyx, vendored from febiosoftware/FEBio's Documentation/ directory. Note this is a stripped-down cut of the upstream manual rather than the complete document.
  • Converter — tools/lyx2md.py, the same deterministic, stdlib-only LyX parser used for the Theory and Studio manuals. All 14 chapters are converted (Chapters 1–9 plus Appendices A–E).
  • Bibliography — source/FEBio3.bib. The vendored cut carries 12 citations but lost the upstream document's own bibfiles pointer; FEBio3.bib is the database upstream names, and every cited key resolves in it. Citations render as per-page footnotes.
  • Equations — rendered with MathJax. The manual's six \newcommand operator macros (\tr, \dev, \Dev, \grad, \divg, \Ei) are declared globally in docs/js/mathjax_config.js.
  • Figures — not part of the LyX source; fetched at build time from the FEBio repository's Documentation/Figures/ directory by build.py.

See CONVERSION_NOTES_USER.md for the per-chapter breakdown and everything flagged for manual review.