Re: Trigrp

[munzner]

> I don't seem to find any button labelled Triangle Groups in my geomview
> panel (assuming you are referring to the window and panel that
> appear when you type geomview).  What I am not understanding?  Peter

Well, "Triangle Groups" is supposed to appear in the browser labelled
"External Modules" in the lower lefthand corner of the main panel.
The external modules are hooked up to geomview by way of the
system-wide ".geomview" startup file in the $GEOMROOT data directory. 
When I retested the distribution package, the mechanism that sets the
GEOMROOT variable to the directory that the distribution is unpacked
in worked correctly. 

The systemwide startup file also sets the background color to grey
instead of black. If your camera windows are coming up with a black
background, then the systemwide startup file is never even found.
Guess #1: Did you move the GEOMDATA directory without modifying the
Makedefs file referred to below before compiling?  Here's the relevant
part of the README file:

  4. If you plan to install Geomview in some directory outside of its
     source tree, edit the file Makedefs in the GEOMROOT directory.  That
     file contains comments telling you what to do.  If you plan to
     leave Geomview installed in its source directory, you may skip
     this step.

And these are the relevant comments in the Makedefs file:

  # GEOMDATA should be the absolute pathname of a directory which
  # Geomview will search for data files.  This directory may contain
  # sample input files, and/or a file named ".geomview" containing
  # commands which Geomview will execute upon startup.  If you leave
  # this blank, the makefiles use a default directory distributed with
  # Geomview (the "data" directory).  If you put something here, it is
  # your responsibility to install the example files from the "data"
  # directory into this directory (the makefiles will not do it
  # automatically).
  
  GEOMDATA = 



If your background is coming up grey but nothing appears in the
"External Modules" browser, try looking at the systemwide .geomview
file.  Guess #2: You didn't move the GEOMDATA directory but for some
reason the systemwide .geomview file is still not being invoked. Copy
it into the same directory that you call geomview from: does this
solve the problem? It should look like the one below, but with
different (and correct!) pathnames at the end of the
"ui-emotion-program" lines. If the pathnames are incorrect, the lines
"Triangle Groups" and "4D Rotation" should still appear in the
External Modules browser but clicking on them will cause an error.

  # This is a sample Geomview startup file.  You can put commands here
  # which will be executed by Geomview each time it starts up.  Comments
  # start with a '#' and go to the end of the line.
  
  # You should wrap all commands in this file in a "progn" to
  # cause them all to be interpreted at the same time.
  
  # The following commands simply reset some of Geomview's hardwired
  # defaults; they are listed here just as an example.
  
  (progn
    (backcolor allcams .33 .33 .33) # set all cameras' background color to grey
    (bbox-color allgeoms 1 1 0)	# set all geoms' bounding box color to yellow
  
    # Make the example programs appear on the "EXTERNAL MODULES" menu
  
    (ui-emotion-program "Triangle Groups" "/usr8/geom/devel/ngrap/bin/sgi/Trigrp")
    (ui-emotion-program "4-D Rotation" "/usr8/geom/devel/ngrap/bin/sgi/4drotate")
  )
  

Sorry about the late response. Let me know if either of the above
guesses were correct (guess #2 indicates a bug on our part) or if
neither helped.

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