[diagrams] diagrams status

[Ryan Yates]

I'll all for option 1, but there might be a compromise with 1 and 3 that
allow us to add some more information to transformations that aid in getting
1 (i.e. something easy to calculate when you have the parameters to the
transformation, but hard when the transformation is opaque).

Ryan

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Scott N. Walck <walck at lvc.edu> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 11:48:26AM -0400, Brent Yorgey wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Here's an update on the current status of the diagrams project.
> > Obviously things are sort of ground to a halt at the moment.  Partly
> > that's due to me being busy with my internship at Microsoft Research.
> > But partly it's because of a giant roadblock in the design of the
> > project itself.
> >
> > As you may already know, the main issue is the way our functional
> > representation of convex bounding regions interacts with certain
> > transformations.  In particular, we don't know how to correctly
> > transform convex bounding regions under transformations that don't
> > preserve angles (which includes shears, non-uniform scales, and pretty
> > much all projective transformations).  I see three options:
> >
> >   1) Buckle down and work really hard and figure out how to do it.
> >      Pros: this would be awesome.
> >      Cons: we don't even know if it's possible.
> >
> >   2) Only allow angle-preserving transformations.
> >      Pros: this option is simplest.
> >      Cons: might be too restrictive.
> >
> >   3) Switch to a different representation of bounding regions that
> >      will integrate better with general transformations.
> >      Pros: ability to do general transformations.
> >      Cons: probably a lot of work, and the current representation
> >      seems so elegant and functional, it would be a shame to give it
> >      up.
> >
>
> I could live without shears and projective transformations, but non-uniform
> scaling seems a very basic and natural thing to want to do.
> "I want this diagram to be the same height but twice as wide."
> This is just the kind of thinking that makes the combinator-based
> drawing approach so powerful.  I would give up three and higher dimensions
> before I'd give up horizontal scaling.
>
> Scott
>
>
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