New release (v0.8.11rc9)

["Andrew D. Hwang" <ahwang@mathcs.holycross.edu>]

A new unstable release of ePiX is available. This release represents a
substantial update in both design and features, in contrast to the past
few releases (some of them not announced), which have for the most part
have fixed minor bugs.

  http://math.holycross.edu/~ahwang/current/ePiX.html

While I expect this release should be fun to play with, I don't recommend
using it for "real" figures yet.

Please note that the project page is now at
"math.holycross.edu" rather than
"mathcs.holycross.edu".


Features
---

Clipping (removal of objects lying outside a 3-D box) and cropping
(culling of objects outside the bounding box in the screen plane) are
systematically implemented. The commands "clip()" and "crop()" activate
clipping/cropping. The clip_box defaults to a Very Large Cube centered at
the origin. As in earlier releases, the commands "clip_box" and "clip_to"
are used to set bounds for clipping.

The "triple" class is now called "P". ("triple" is a typedef, for backward
compatibility.)

Dashed and dotted paths have been re-implemented to avoid using eepic.sty.
The quality Should be better, but at the cost of output file size.

Arrows no longer have filled heads, so they can be colored (again).

The camera should now work as advertized when the viewpoint or target are
changed. (There were a number of bugs in Versions up to 0.8.11rc6.)

Lots of small-to-medium enhancements have crept in over the past months;
please see the CHANGELOG. :)

A few medium-sized chunks of arcane code (including arcana.*, legacy, and
flow_plot) have been taken out. Please let me know if you found any of
these features useful.


Bugs and Changes
---

The contrib package doesn't compile. I don't expect this to be difficult
to fix, but I won't even try until the base package is stabilized.

Rectangles (and possibly other polygons) don't always clip correctly.

ODE plotting should be able to handle 3-D solutions, but I'm getting
unpredictable results -- differently unpredictable on two test machines.

gcc-2.95 won't compile a couple of functions because of their default
arguments. Since gcc-3.* is fairly widespread, I may not fix this.

The "Line" function is likely to cause problems, since the clip_box is no
longer a cylinder over the bounding_box. Please use "line", together with
cropping.

There are surely other problems; I haven't done thorough testing. Please
let me know if you find misbehavior, backward incompatibility, or other
glitches.


The Future
---

Plotting has been completely re-implemented, as a practice run for The New
Version. I hope that the coming stable release will be ready in the near
future (weeks...?), and that it will be the final release from this code
tree. I'd also like 0.8.11 to stand the test of time, such as it may be,
so suggestions and bug reports are particularly welcome.

The New Version is 18 months overdue, and I'm hesitant to predict its
readiness. The design feels solidified (to the point where I'm proceeding
with an article for TUGBoat), and the current implementations (points and
vectors, the camera, and the picture class) seem close to final. The past
ten days (solid coding:) have given me a better idea of how to implement
plotting (including hidden object removal), but The New Version is still
technically vaporware. (Stalling development further, tenure pressure may
soon eclipse ePiX for my attention.)


Eye Candy
---

For those of you who haven't checked the project page recently: There's a
page of animations (fairly large files, I'm afraid). A few samples
incorporate (manual) surface shading, fake transparency, and hidden object
removal.  These examples were created with 0.8.11rc5, and should compile
with 0.8.10.

--Andy


Andrew D. Hwang			ahwang@mathcs.holycross.edu
Department of Math and CS	http://math.holycross.edu/~ahwang
College of the Holy Cross	(508) 793-2458 (Office: 320 Swords)
Worcester, MA, 01610-2395	(508) 793-3530 (fax)