[rdm at cfcl.com: Re: PTF inquiry]

[mbp]

I just noticed that this didn't get cc'ed to software.  Here's a copy:

Date: Mon, 4 Jan 93 00:30:21 PST
From: rdm at cfcl.com (Rich Morin)
To: mbp at geom, rdm at cfcl.com
Subject: Re:  PTF inquiry

The booklet contains ~20 pages of introductory and troubleshooting material
(how to use the discs...), followed by a Hierarchical Package List and a
Permuted Index.  Your package would get a line in the first, and several
permutations of the line in the second.

The real summary information sits on the discs.  I make up a separate
directory for each package.  It contains the compressed archive files,
a verbose tar listing for each, a 0.lst file (summarizing the top four
levels of all the archive files), and a 0.lst file.  Your proposed 0.lst
file is listed below; I would be happy to get comments and suggestions
for changes.

Yours, Rich Morin
rdm at cfcl.com

===========================================================================
Package:        math/geomview

Description:    Geomview/OOGL - interactive 3D object viewing program

Version:        1.2.3

Notes:

  This is release 1.2 of geomview, an interactive viewer for 3- and 4-D
  geometric objects from the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota,
  built on OOGL, an object-oriented geometry library.  Geomview is loosely a
  successor of our earlier program MinneView.

  Geomview at present runs only on Irises.  A Next Quick Renderman version
  is currently under development. A Sun X-windows version using XGL is planned.
  ...
  Geomview accepts geometric data in a variety of simple ASCII and binary file
  formats and displays them in a workstation's graphics window(s), letting you
  examine them interactively.  Multiple objects can be manipulated
  independently; there may be several views of them.

   Control panels

   There are interactive controls for shaded/wireframe drawing, lighting and
   material properties, etc., built using Mark Overmars' FORMS package.  Most
   controls are also available via keyboard shortcuts.

   Direct interaction

   Motions of objects and points of view are controlled by direct interaction:
   gestures of the mouse in the graphics window.

   Geometric data types

   We have some polygonal data types: lists of quadrilaterals (QUAD),
   quadrilateral meshes (MESH), polylists: collections of polygons with shared
   vertices (OFF), all optionally with colors and surface normals.  Lines and
   points are provided (VECT), as are Bezier surface patches (BBP, BEZ) of
   arbitrary degree, including rational patches.  LISTs build collections of
   these, and INSTs apply homogeneous 4x4 transformations to them, including
   replicating a single object under a collection of transformations.  Four
   dimensional visualization is now supported.  Points for any object can be
   in homogeneous coordinates: {x,y,z,w} quadruplets instead of {x,y,z}
   triplets.  The 4D->3D transformation can be specified with an INST. 

   Other spaces

   Besides ordinary Euclidean 3-space, geomview also deals with hyperbolic
   3-space and Euclidean 4-space.  The hyperbolic model is the projective one,
   where geodesics are straight lines and isometries are represented as 4x4
   projective matrices.  4-D objects are shown in 3-D by projecting from the
   origin (not by slicing).

   External controls

   Besides its interactive controls, geomview can also be driven by external
   programs.  A lisp-like command language can control most aspects of the
   program.  Also one can externally supply geometric objects and
   transformations, changing all or part of a geometric hierarchy on the fly.
   The viewer can act as a graphical front-end for other applications, showing
   e.g.  a simulation's dynamically changing output, or a program-driven
   animation.

        .../doc/overview

Language(s):    ?

Requirements:   ?

Origin:
 
  geom.umn.edu:/pub/geomview
    *

  The Geometry Center
  University of Minnesota
  1300 S. 2nd St.
  Minneapolis, MN  55454  USA
  software@geom.umn.edu

See Also:       ?

Restrictions:   ?

References:     ?