Geomview/OOGL Release 1.9.5
			     February 2009
			     -------------

CONTENTS
--------

        Introduction
	Note to Users of Previous Geomview Versions
        Installation
        More about Geomview
        External Modules
        Auxiliary Programs
        Documentation
        Geomview Support
        History
        Miscellaneous
        Known Bugs
        Improvements/Wish list
        Bug Reports and Comments



INTRODUCTION
------------
                                   
This is version 1.9.5 of Geomview/OOGL.  See the file NEWS for a summary
of changes in this release, and the file ChangeLog for specific
details.

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

Geomview runs on many unix-like platforms including but not limited to
GNU/Linux, Solaris, IRIX, and AIX. It requires X windows, OpenGL, and
Motif (or OpenMotif). It also works with Mesa, which is a
free-software replacement to OpenGL. See www.geomview.org for more
information.

In addition, if you use geomview please consider joining the
geomview-users mailing list; send an empty note with 'subscribe' in
the subject line to geomview-users-request@lists.sourceforge.net, or
visit the list web page at
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/geomview-users.


NOTE TO USERS OF PREVIOUS GEOMVIEW VERSIONS
-------------------------------------------

If you're a user of a really old (version 1.6 or earlier) version of
Geomview and you're looking for some of the external modules that were
included in the older versions but that are not present in this
release, you can still download the old versions of Geomview from
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/download/geomview.html.

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

See the files INSTALL.Geomview and INSTALL for instructions
on compiling and installing Geomview.


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

Geomview is the product of an effort at the Geometry Center at the
University of Minnesota 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 and Maple 3-D graphics output; for
information on this see the files OOGL.m.txt and gvplot.txt, respectively,
in the "doc" subdirectory.

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

Geomview comes with several "external modules" (emodules) -- programs
that communicate with geomview through a command language.  The list
of currently installed modules appears in the "Modules" 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	   	DESCRIPTION
~~~~~~          ~~~~~~~~~~~
Animate:	flip through a sequence of objects
Clipboard:      save a single OOGL object to a clipboard
Gvclock:        an animated clock
Nose:           debugging/example for picking (see Geomview manual)

Modules involving extra libraries like XForms or Tcl/Tk have been
moved to separate packages to make the maintenance of the Geomview
main-package easier. The packages can be downloaded from the Geomview
download area at Sourceforge.net. The names of the emodule packages,
and the emodules they contain, are as follows:

Package gvemod-xforms-example -- example XForms-based emodule
*************************************************************
  MODULE          DESCRIPTION
  ~~~~~~          ~~~~~~~~~~~
  Example:        generic FORMS example external module

Package gvemodules-xforms -- emodules which require the XForms package
**********************************************************************
  MODULE          DESCRIPTION
  ~~~~~~          ~~~~~~~~~~~
  Cplxview:       visualize the graphs of complex functions
  Example:        generic FORMS example external module
  Flythrough:     "Not Knot" visualisation (hyperbolic space)
  Ginsu:          interactively slice objects (see "clip")
  Graffiti:       draw line segments on objects
  Hinge:          "copy-rotate" a polyhedron around edges of itself
  Stereo:         stereo vision module
  Sweep:          generate objects of rotation from line segments
  Tackdown:       redefine an object's "home" position
  Transformer:    explicitly control an object's transformation matrix

Package maniview -- requires XForms
***********************************
  MODULE          DESCRIPTION
  ~~~~~~          ~~~~~~~~~~~
  Maniview        visualize 3d manifolds and orbifolds

Pacakge gvemod-crayola -- requires Tcl/Tk
*****************************************
  MODULE          DESCRIPTION
  ~~~~~~          ~~~~~~~~~~~
  Crayola:        interactive colouring of OOGL objects

Package gvemod-labeler -- requires Tcl/Tk
*****************************************
  MODULE          DESCRIPTION
  ~~~~~~          ~~~~~~~~~~~
  Labeler:        somewhat crude generation of text as OOGL object

gvemod-ndview -- requires Tcl/Tk
****************************************************
  MODULE          DESCRIPTION
  ~~~~~~          ~~~~~~~~~~~
  3D-Snapshot:    Save a 3D projection of an ND object
  Colormap:       Coloring of ND objects w.r.t. the "invisible" directions
  NDview:         visualization of objects in > 3D
  NDdemo:         a demo for ND visualization
  Origin:         draw a coordinate frame for an OOGL object
  Slicer:         Slice ND objects (see also Ginsu above)

                                                                        
AUXILIARY PROGRAMS
------------------

PROGRAM	    	DESCRIPTION

anytooff:	convert any OOGL object into OFF format
anytoucd:	convert any OOGL object into UCD format
bdy:		compute the boundary edges of a geom as a VECT file
bez2mesh:	convert Bezier object to MESH
clip:		clip OOGL objects against planes or other surfaces
hvectext:	produce VECT text from Ghostscript Hershey fonts
math2oogl:	convert Mathematica graphics object to OOGL format
offconsol:	consolidate duplicate vertices in an OFF file
oogl2rib:	convert OOGL to RenderMan RIB (see doc/OOGL.m.txt)
oogl2vrml:      convert OOGL to VRML version 1
oogl2vrml2:     convert OOGL to VRML version 2
polymerge:	merge vertices, edges, and faces in an OFF file
togeomview:	pipe GCL commands or geometry to a copy of geomview,
		  invoking geomview if necessary
ucdtooff:	convert UCD format file into an OFF OOGL file


COMPUTER ALGEBRA INTERFACES
---------------------------
gvplot.mapleVx: plot interface to Maple (tm). `x' is in {3, 4, 8}.
  The source code and Maple V8 work-sheets which can be used to
  generate a Maple library are installed below
  PREFIX/share/geomview/Maple/. After installation the documentation
  can be found in PREFIX/share/doc/geomview-VERISION/README.gvplot

math2oogl:	convert Mathematica graphics object to OOGL format


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

A comprehensive manual is in the "doc" subdirectory.  You can also
read or download the manual from the Geomview web site,
www.geomview.org.

"make install" installs the documentation under

PREFIX/share/doc/geomview-VERSION/

The manual comes in Info, PDF and HTML format.

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 can be found in several manual pages; the manual
pages are installed in their proper locations by "make install".  Some
of the external modules, as well as geomview itself, has a manual
page. Of particular interest are:

	geomview(1)	geomview man page
	geomview(5)	geomview command language reference
	oogl(5)		OOGL file format reference

Other documentation is also moved to PREFIX/share/doc/geomview-VERSION/
by "make install", e.g.

	OOGL.m.txt	documentation for interface to Mathematica
	README.gvplot	documentation for interface to Maple

GEOMVIEW MAILING LIST
---------------------

geomview-users@lists@sourceforge.net

    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 sometimes 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 join the list, go the list
    web page at http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/geomview-users.

GEOMVIEW WEB SITE
-----------------

The geomview web site is http://www.geomview.org.

HISTORY
-------

This project began in the summer of 1988 at the University of
Minnesota's Geometry Center with the work of Pat Hanrahan on a viewing
program called MinneView.  Shortly thereafter Charlie Gunn begin
developing OOGL in conjunction with MinneView.  In 1991 a team of
programmers headed by Mark Phillips, Stuart Levy, and Tamara Munzner
set about developing a revised version of OOGL and a new viewer which
they named Geomview.  In the time since then, many people have
contributed, including (in alphabetical order): Jorge Barros de Abreu,
Steve Anderson, Rex Dieter, Celeste Fowler, Claus-Justus Heine, Todd
Kaplan, Daniel Krech, Mario Lopez, Mark Meuer, Daeron Meyer, Steve
Robbins, Timothy Rowley, Raphael Straub, Nathaniel Thurston, Scott Wisdom,
Lloyd Wood and others.

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

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

Geomview is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser Public
License (LGPL); see the file COPYING for details.
    
The file MANIFEST contains a list of the files in this distribution.


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

Picking can fail if any part of any object is behind the camera plane. (SNX)

BUG REPORTS AND COMMENTS
------------------------

Please send bug reports and comments about Geomview to
geomview-users@sourceforge.net.


========================================================================
This release packed up by:
    Claus-Justus Heine <Claus.Heine@Mathematik.Uni-Freiburg.DE>