		      Geomview/OOGL Release 1.8.0
			   November 17, 2000
			   -----------------

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 1.8 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 used an older version of Geomview (in the 1.6 or earlier
release series, from the Geometry Center) you may notice that this
release is missing some things that were in previous releases.  In
particular several of the external modules that used to come with
Geomview are not in this release.  That's simply because they haven't
been ported to the new GNU-autoconf Makefile system.  You can still
download previous Geomview releases from
ftp://ftp.geom.umn.edu/pub/software/geomview, and with some of these
modules it may be a simple matter to port them.  If you port one to
the new Makefile system, contact me [mbp@geomtech.com] and I'll
include it in a future Geomview release.


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.doc and gvplot.doc, respectively,
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 "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
example:	generic FORMS example external module
ginsu:		interactively slice objects (see "clip")
graffiti:	draw line segments on objects
sweep:		generate objects of rotation from line segments
tackdown:	redefine an object's "home" position
transformer:	explicitly control an object's transformation matrix


									
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 OOGL.m.doc)
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


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.

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
	man/cat5/oogl.5		OOGL file format reference
	doc/OOGL.m.doc		documentation for interface to Mathematica
	doc/gvplot.doc		documentation for interface to Maple


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

There are three electronic mail addresses for communication
regarding geomview:

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, 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.

software@geomview.org

    This is the "official" bug-reporting address.  Please send notes
    about any bugs you find to this address.

register@geomview.org

    Use this address to tell us what you are doing with Geomview.  If
    you use Geomview in your work please send us a note at this
    address telling us what you are doing with it.  We're always
    interested to hear about new applications of Geomview, and we may
    include a link on www.geomview.org to your work (but we'll check
    with you first before doing this).


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): Steve Anderson,
Celeste Fowler, Todd Kaplan, Daniel Krech, Mario Lopez, Daeron Meyer,
Mark Meuer , Timothy Rowley, Nathaniel Thurston, Scott Wisdom, 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
software@geomview.org.


========================================================================
This release packed up by:
    Mark Phillips @ Geometry Technologies, Inc.
    Suite 550, 413 Wacouta St., St. Paul, MN 55101
    Phone: 651-223-2884  Fax: 651-292-0014
    mbp@geomtech.com       http://www.geomtech.com
