Introduction 

As the variety of existent formats worldwide is too big to be implemented in GiD and, currently, the number of supported formats for mesh and results information in GiD is limited, the GiD team has implemented a new mechanism which enables third party libraries to transfer mesh and results to GiD, so that GiD can be used to visualize simulation data written in whatever format this simulation program is using.
This new mechanism is the well know mechanism of plug-ins. Particularly GiD supports the loading of dynamic libraries to read any simulation data and transfer the mesh and results information to GiD.
Viewing GiD as a platform of products, this feature allows a further level of integration of the simulation code in GiD by means of transferring the results of the simulation to GiD in any format specified by this simulation code thus avoiding the use of a foreign format.

The recognized plug-ins are automatically loaded in GiD and appear in the top menu bar in the Files->Import->Plugins submenu.