Directory graphics/metapost/contrib/macros/mp3d

              3d/3dgeom version 1.34
              ======================

This entire package is released under the LPPL, version 1 or (at your
option) any later version.

This release is a intermediary release of the 3d metapost package.
It updates the 3d package (CTAN:graphics/metapost/macros/3d)
and adds features facilitating the creation of space geometry drawings.

There have been a number of changes, and as a consequence we had
to slightly update the description published in TUGboat in 1998.
See the doc directory. The doc directory contains both
the old 1998 article, a corrected version, the 2001 GUTenberg
article on geometry in space and its translation which appeared in 2003
(TUGboat 2001).

The 1998 package is completely contained in this release in the directory
v1.0, except that some files have been renamed in order to prevent
a conflict. For istance, 3d.mp has been renamed into 3d-1.0.mp
when necessary. Also, the doc directory from the 1.0 version has been
transferred to the current doc directory. 

The 1.0 version should still be of interest for the documentation
of its file, which used mft (see for instance v1.0/doc/3d-1.0.ps).

As version 1.34 is an intermediate release, it may lack some
uniformity which might be added later. Also, the sources do contain
preliminary and documented material.

This release contains three directories:

  doc : documentation
  examples : all the examples from the Space Geometry article
  inputs : the files needed for metapost


HOW TO CREATE AN ANIMATION
--------------------------

Details are given to produce the standard animation
under UNIX, with the binaries listed below.
For other architectures, you may have to adapt the
write_script macro in the 3d.mp file.

  1) create a directory and copy the .mp files from the
     inputs directory to it.
  2) apply metapost to animpoly.mp ; this will create 100 files
     named animpoly.101, animpoly.102, ..., animpoly.200.
     It will also have created a script file named
     create_animation.sh
  3) copy the gifmerge utility (as well as programs such as pnmcut,...)
     in this directory or let it be reachable through PATH.
  4) apply sh to create_animation.sh; this will create the animation;
     first the metapost outputs are converted to gif, then
     they are collated with gifmerge.
  5) the result is animpoly.gif which is a GIF89A animation file;
     it can be viewed under netscape or simply with a program like xanim.

                 Binaries required by the 3D package
                 -----------------------------------

As it is, the generation of animated gifs requires the following
programs:

  awk
  gs (ghostscript)
  pnmcut
  ppmquant
  ppmtogif
  gifmerge

These executables are not part of that distribution.

The first two are widely available on UNIX. 
The three p* programs are part of the NETPBM toolkit.
You can find this toolkit on the web through any search tool.
And gifmerge can be found at http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~kiwi/GIFMerge.

I have no idea how to port all this on other architectures,
but I assume there are similar tools for PCs or Macs.
I'd be interested to get feedback and details so that i can 
include instructions in future releases of my package.

========================================================================
Denis Roegel, 17 August 2003
roegel@loria.fr