Re: [Texmacs-dev] Drawing mode feature request: Annotation of .eps graphics.

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Tue, 2005-11-08 at 00:24 +0100, Henri Lesourd wrote:
> >I'd like to create a diagram with some tool, and then use the drawing
> >mode to put text annotations, etc. on it.
> >
> An patch for exactly this feature exists, but
> it had to be delayed due to problems for the
> accessibility of the parameters of the <superpose>
> TeXmacs primitive. I should finish this one
> in the next few days (but you will need to
> get the CVS version, if you want to use it
> next week).

You're amazing.  Thank you for spending so much of your time developing
these new features of TeXmacs.

As a study, I created two vector diagrams for my last Introductory
Linear Algebra assignment hand-in.  One diagram was created using
'eukleides', and the other with 'drgeo'.  The first took more than 3
hours to complete, even after having had some experience with eukleides
from past use.  The second took around an hour, including time
experimenting with DrGeo, since I've never used it before.  Certainly
the interactive drawing editor is easier to use and faster than purely
scripted one.

Some things I noticed:

DrGeo needs love and attention.  It's not working right, and needs
development time spent on it.  For the most part, it's very good, and I
liked using it.  It's fun to learn to create geometric constructions
like that.  What I don't like is that I have to click and modify
attributes of each line at a time.  I like the XFig feature where you
put it into an update attributes mode and then click around on things to
set them with one click.  I like how all the settings are displayed on a
panel at the bottom.  Certainly there are features of XFig worth mining
a few nuggets from.  I had trouble getting a usable .eps from DrGeo; I
found that the best route was to export to LaTeX, run that to get
a .dvi, then run dvips and finally pstoepsi then rename the .epsi
to .eps so that TeXmacs could see it.  Round-about, but it works.

Eukleides is just as interesting, but having to script it makes creating
a diagram into a very slow iterative process.  Something that combines
the two approaches in some way might be cool... though I suppose DrGeo
already does this, since it has Guile built into it.  I like the idea of
having the potential to automate some kinds of diagramming or graphing
using Scheme or some mathematical language built from a Scheme
framework.

I would really love to have the ability to easily and interactively
create 3-dimensional geometric constructions that can be viewed from any
of a number of vantage points.  I'm not sure how the interface to such a
thing would work...  My intuition is telling me I should get 'blender'
and see how they do it.  I want to make diagrams like the ones in my
calculus textbook.

-- 
Karl Hegbloom <address@hidden>