Geomview for Nextstep

[munzner]

Here's information about Geomview. We distribute fat NeXTStep binaries
which will work on both NeXT hardware and 486's. If you have a more
specific question we can give you a more specific answer. 

Tamara Munzner          ((555) 555-5555
munzner at geom.umn.edu    The Geometry Center  

========================================================================

                      Geomview/OOGL Release 1.4.2
                         The Geometry Center
			    April 28, 1993
			    --------------

INTRODUCTION
------------
                                   
This is version 1.4.2 of Geomview/OOGL. It runs on Silicon Graphics
IRIS workstations, on NeXT computers under NeXTStep 3.0, and on NextStep/Intel
under NeXTStep 3.1.  A beta release of a generic X version is also available.

Geomview is an interactive geometry viewing program.  OOGL, which
stands for Object Oriented Graphics Library, is the library upon which
Geomview is built.

NOTE: Please read the file REGISTER.  We need to know how our users
are using Geomview so that we can better serve you.

In addition, if you use geomview please send an email note to
geomview-users-request at geom.umn.edu requesting to be added to the
geomview-users mailing list; this list is for announcements regarding
geomview and for geomview users to communicate with each other.  See
the details in the GEOMVIEW E-MAIL section below.

INSTALLATION
------------

See the INSTALL file for installation details.  Disk space required:
    geomview-next.tar, installed			15.5 MB
    geomview-sgi.tar.Z, untarred			15.1 MB
    geomview.tar.Z
	source only, untarred				   7 MB
	source, compiled for Next (fat binaries) & SGI	 107 MB
	source, compiled for SGI only			  80 MB

      Editing makefiles/Makedefs.global to set COPTS = -O
      rather than the default COPTS = -g yields:

	source, compiled for SGI only, COPTS=-O		  61 MB
	source, compiled for NeXT, fat binaries, COPTS=-O 52 MB

MORE ABOUT GEOMVIEW
-------------------

Geomview represents the current state of an ongoing effort at the
Geometry Center to provide interactive geometry software which is
particularly appropriate for mathematics research and education.  In
particular, geomview can display things in hyperbolic and spherical
space as well as Euclidean space.

Geomview allows multiple independently controllable objects and
cameras.  It provides interactive control for motion, appearances
(including lighting, shading, and materials), picking on an object,
edge or vertex level, snapshots in SGI image file or Renderman RIB
format, and adding or deleting objects is provided through direct
mouse manipulation, control panels, and keyboard shortcuts.  External
programs can drive desired aspects of the viewer (such as continually
loading changing geometry or controlling the motion of certain
objects) while allowing interactive control of everything else.

Geomview supports the following simple data types: polyhedra with
shared vertices (.off), quadrilaterals, rectangular meshes, vectors,
and Bezier surface patches of arbitrary degree including rational
patches. Object hierarchies can be constructed with lists of objects
and instances of object(s) transformed by one or many 4x4 matrices.
Arbitrary portions of changing hierarchies may be transmitted by
creating named references.

Geomview can display Mathematica graphics output; for information
on this see the file OOGL.m.doc in the "doc" subdirectory.


EXTERNAL MODULES
----------------

Geomview comes with several "external modules" --- programs that
communicate with geomview through a command language.  The list of
currently installed modules appears in the "Applications" browser on
geomview's main panel.  To invoke a module, click the mouse on the
appropriate line in this browser.  The modules in this distribution
are:

MODULE	   PLATFORMS	DESCRIPTION

4dview:		S	4-dimensional slicing & rotation
CellularAutomata: S 	cellular automata animation
animate:	SNX	flip through a sequence of objects
clipboard:	S	cut, copy and paste geometric objects
corners:	S	create vector skeleton of object
crayola:	SN	interactively color objects
drawbdy:	SNX	compute and draw the boundary of an object
flythrough:	S	interactive version of "Not Knot" hyperbolic flythrough
ginsu:		S	interactively slice objects
graffiti:	SN	draw line segments on objects
gvclock:	SNX	3D clock, demonstrates real-time motion
hinge:		S	hinge copies of a polyhedron around its edges
maniview:	S	3-manifold viewer
NDview:		S	N-dimensional viewing controls and demonstration
NDdemo:		S	N-dimensional viewing demonstration
nose:		SN	demonstrates picking
pssnap:		SNX	generate PostScript snapshot
stereo:		S	hardware, crosseyed, red/cyan stereo (beta version)
sweep:		SN	generate objects of rotation from line segments
tackdown:	S	redefine an object's "home" position
transformer:	S	explicitly control an object's transformation matrix
trigrp:		S	explore triangle symmetry groups
warp:		SN	interactively deform an object
									
	
AUXILIARY PROGRAMS
-------------------

PROGRAM	    PLATFORMS	DESCRIPTION

anytooff:	SNX	convert any OOGL object into OFF format
bdy:		SNX  	compute the boundary edges of a geom as a VECT file
geomstuff:	SX	pipe your program's OOGL data to geomview via a pipe
math2oogl:	SNX	convert Mathematica graphics object to OOGL format
offconsol:	SNX  	consolidate duplicate vertices in an OFF file
oogl2rib	SNX	convert OOGL to RenderMan RIB (see OOGL.m.doc)
togeomview:	SNX	pipe GCL commands or geometry to a copy of geomview,
		    	  invoking geomview if necessary

(S means SGI version exists, N means NeXTStep version exists,
X means X version exists)

DOCUMENTATION
-------------

A comprehensive manual is in the "doc" subdirectory.

The file doc/oogltour gives an introduction to the OOGL file format,
which is the format of geometry files that geomview reads.  More
details are in the manual.

Further documentation is in the "man" directory, which contains Unix
manual pages in both nroff source and formatted form.  Each external
module, as well as geomview itself, has a manual page. Of particular
interest are:

	man/cat1/geomview.1	geomview man page
	man/cat5/geomview.5	geomview command language reference
				  manual
	man/cat5/oogl.5		OOGL file format reference manual
	doc/OOGL.m.doc		documentation for interface to
				  Mathematica



GEOMVIEW E-MAIL
---------------

There are three electronic mail addresses for communication regarding
geomview:

geomview-users at geom.umn.edu:

    This is a mailing list of people using geomview and can be used
    for communication between users regarding geomview problems,
    questions, experiences, etc.  The geomview authors are also a part
    of this list and will respond to questions posted to it.  We also
    use this list to make announcements about new releases and other
    things of interest to users.  To be added to or removed from the
    geomview-users list, send a note to geomview-users-request at geom.umn.edu

software@geom.umn.edu:

    This is the "official" support line; it reaches the geomview
    authors directly.  In general if you have a question or comment
    that may be of interest to other users, send it to the
    "geomview-users" address.  Use "software" for communication
    intended just for the authors; in particular, send bug reports and
    suggestions for improvement to this address.

register at geom.umn.edu

    Use this address to tell us what you are doing with Geomview.  The
    Geometry Center is funded by the National Science Foundation, and
    it is important that we be able to report to NSF the ways in which
    our software is being used.  If you use Geomview in your work
    please send us a note at this address telling us what you are
    doing with it.  See the file REGISTRY for more details.  Please do
    not send bug reports or questions to this address; use
    "software@geom.umn.edu" for that.


HISTORY
-------

This project began in the sumer of 1988 with the work of Pat Hanrahan
on a viewing program called MinneView.  Shortly thereafter Charlie
Gunn begin developing OOGL in conjunction with MinneView.  In the time
since then, many people have contributed, including Stuart Levy, Mark
Meuer, Tamara Munzner, Steve Anderson, Mario Lopez, Todd Kaplan. 

In 1991, OOGL was rewritten and a new viewer geomview was begun.  Both
geomview and the new OOGL have a core of device-independent common
code. Currently there are device drivers for SGI GL, PhotoRealistic
RenderMan, and Quick RenderMan on the NeXT. The NeXT version of
geomview was written by Daniel Krech and Scott Wisdom.  Scott Wisdom
wrote the Photo Realistic and Quick RenderMan OOGL drivers. The SGI
version of geomview and OOGL was written by Stuart Levy, Tamara
Munzner, and Mark Phillips.  The geomview common kernel was written by
Stuart Levy, Tamara Munzner, and Mark Phillips, with contributions
from Nathaniel Thurston and Celeste Fowler.  The X version was created by
Daeron Meyer.

MISCELLANEOUS
-------------

For a list of changes between versions, see the file CHANGES.

Geomview is copyrighted software.  Please read the file COPYING in
this directory before using or distributing Geomview.
    
The file MANIFEST contains a list of the files in this distribution.


KNOWN BUGS
----------

Picking does not work if any part of any object is behind the camera plane.


IMPROVEMENTS/WISH LIST
----------------------

More modules will be converted to NeXTStep, and the way modules are
handled on under NeXTSTEP should improve.