Re: [help-3dldf] Ellipsoids

[Laurence Finston]

Hi Martijn,

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004, Martijn van Manen wrote:

>
> The address was address@hidden

Yes.

> I take it that you found my remarks useful?

Very much so.

> You can do with them whatever you want.

Thank you, but I can't use them in the package without
a copyright assignment.  It's a legal matter.

> I just wanted to help you,
> because I thought it was nice and useful what you were trying to do.

Thank you.

> Whether or not you put my name somewhere, I really don't care. Do as
> you see fit.

Credit where credit is due.

> All that info though is explained much better by other
> people.

Perhaps, but it's not free.  It is the policy of the Free
Software Foundation to encourage people to provide free
documentation for free software and to minimize the number
of references to non-free works in GNU manuals.  I will be
removing many such references in the next editions of the
manual and _GNU 3DLDF:  The Program_.  This goal unfortunately
conflicts with my desire to include a comprehensive
bibliography, because most books are non-free.
Also, your explanations specifically address matters
relevant to 3DLDF.

> Say Marcel
> Berger's Geometry book, the 1977 french original has just been translated
> I believe. For the numerical determination of eigenvalues and so, check
> any applied math book. Though mavbe all that makes tough reading for the
> uninitiated.

It's more a question of not having the time to sit down and
study it, that there's so much information, and that it's
usually not organized with my needs in mind.  I'm not bad at math,
but I've never shown any particular aptitude for it either.
It would have made things easier if I'd developed
an interest in it at an earlier age.
I've also discovered that some of the things I'm interested in, such
as polyhedra and intersections, are non-trivial topics, to
say nothing of knots.

> And, yes, I used TeX. It is not clear to me whether I can use the AMS-LaTeX
> ( some extensions to LaTeX that come in very handy when writing mathematical
> texts, environments for multiline equations, and so on. ) in a TeX info
> document. Probably not.

I'm pretty sure you can't.

> I know some TeX-info, but not a lot. If you really need this stuff in
> tex-info, I can try.

It will be fine if you just write it in TeX.  I'll have to
edit it anyway, and maybe make changes to make it fit in
with the rest of the manual.
I would ask you about this first, maybe even a couple of
times, but eventually I would just make a decision.  I'm
telling you this up front, so you know what you'd be letting
yourself in for.

In order for you to use Texinfo, you'd have to understand
the techniques and macros I use for the manual as well as
Texinfo itself.  If you're really good at TeX it would be
trivial, otherwise it might be a lot of work. If you have
the time and desire to learn this it would make things
easier for me, but I know you have work of your own and I
don't want to take advantage of you.

Math mode material must be converted to plain text anyway for the
HTML and Info output.  I've had some discussion with Karl
Berry, the maintainer of Texinfo, about a "mathimage" feature for
including TeX math mode material as PNG images in the HTML
output.  He wants to implement it within Texinfo, which
would be ideal.  As a stop-gap, I wrote a preprocessor just
for use with 3DLDF, and it works, but I haven't used it
since January, and I've decided not to resurrect it for the
coming release.

Please let me know if you'd be willing to assign copyright
to the FSF.  I can still read your material if you don't
want to, but I think it would be more useful to more people
if I could include it in the documentation.  If you are
willing, I'll send you the form for requesting copyright
papers from the FSF.

Thanks again for all your help.

By the way, if anyone among the readers of this message is
using my development sources, and you need a feature from
Release 1.1.5.1 that's missing, let me know, and I'll try to
put it in.  It's usually not much work to write a couple of
parser rules.

Laurence