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Welcome to Graphics Newsletter No 3! If you have not seen this Newsletter before and wish to get on the mailing list, please send your name and address (preferably by email) to me. New readers are always welcome! New contributors are also always welcome!
If you have experiences of using some new piece of graphics hardware or software, please let me know. A short article outlining the advantages and disadvantages would be very useful to others. We would particularly welcome contributions in the areas of PC graphics, PC CAD, image processing, geographical information systems, visualisation and super workstations.
AGOCG had its second meeting on 13 December. This was more a progress meeting than the first and there were not many major conclusions. We have concentrated on getting information out to people. The Newsletter is thriving under Eae Earnshaw's whip! We have a set of Workshops and Seminars organised for the Spring.
CFC is prepared to sponsor a limited number of participants at these events. Any SERC Engineering Board Grant Holders who are financially embarrassed and wish to attend an event should make a case to Anne Mumford.
We intend producing a set of longer reports on specific topics. For example, we are currently looking at the Colour Hardcopy devices on the market and will issue a factual guide once complete. Other Reports will be produced when the information available is greater than we can issue in the Newsletter.
In the last Newsletter I talked about UNIRAS training materials. These are vitally important if we are to be able to support users of Uniras over the next few years. My aim is to get people to volunteer to do parts of the training materials and to then put these together in a pack of information for Computer Centres. This pack will include introductory handbooks and factscards which can be used by users and also material which can be used for giving courses. This will include slides, viewgraphs and possibly some video material.
I am going to be spending quite a lot of time on this during the spring term. If this material is to be useful then it has to be available as soon as possible. I am looking for ideas, volunteers to do some work - no matter how small a contribution and sites who are prepared to comment on material produced. Please let me know if you have any thoughts. This is going to be useful for everyone I believe and the more thoughts we have at this stage the more useful the end result will be to you.
I also hope to get some UNIRAS courses off the ground. These will be intensive one day courses on the Version 6 software. If you have views on the contents and format please let me know. Also I am looking for suitable sites which will have the Version 6 software mounted early. The first machine ranges which will have the interactives are VAX/VMS, HP 9000 (300 or 800/UX), Sun (3 or 4). Any offers on venues to me, as soon as possible please.
One other suggestion is to get a course on installing the software which seems to cause lots of problems. Any thoughts on this? One idea I have is to have a general overview in the morning and a machine specific discussion in the afternoon. Would you be interested in something like this?
So, getting the UNIRAS software better used is obviously a major concern at the moment. I am also looking at GKS, PHIGS implementations and would be interested in any experiences people have. If you have any software which supports CGM can you let me know as we arc compiling a list of CGM products. Colour plotters are still very much under consideration. Any experiences and views would be useful.
Please spread information about the SGML workshop to any of your colleagues who might be interested. There is a real need for document exchange formats for text and graphics and SGML might be the answer. We need the experts there to help us on this one.
Much continues to develop with regard to the UNIRAS initiative. The Computer Board have approved funding to support a member of UNIRAS' support staff within the community, at Cranfield, on a part time basis. This should enable quicker, more effective support from UNIRAS and permit them direct access to machine ranges that they currently do not have at Slough. Sponsorship is being sought from hardware vendors. There will be further publicity regarding this initiative.
Progress is being made on machine ranges where there are problems, but it is important that CHEST are notified if there is serious concern. The plot competition in 1989 was thought successful by all parties, and will be repeated this year, the closing date is the end of July. Publicity material will be available shortly. Anne Mumford is coordinating a proposal regarding UNIRAS training materials and documentation, further news will be available in due course.
UNIRAS 6.1e with UNIEDIT and Picture Manager is available on UNIRAS' prime machine ranges and will follow on others. It is apparent that UNIGRAPH 2000+ will be their main interactive program and will be most suitable for users, particularly as it will encompass much functionality from UNIMAP as well as UNIGRAPH. The two UNIGRAPH modules form release 6.1f and will probably not now be available to sites until towards the end of Q1,1990 on UNIRAS' prime machine ranges.
Dr Leslaw Zieleznik of Oxford Polytechnic coordinates PC graphics software on behalf of the IGWP. He has produced a detailed evaluation of some PC presentation graphics programs:
Les would be pleased to email copies on request.
As I was Programme Chairman of EG89 with Wolfgang Strasser, this is clearly a biased report of the event! It was late in 1987 that I was asked to get involved in the organisation. We soon settled on a theme of Interaction, Integration and Visualisation which turned out to be very topical by the time 1989 arrived. The emphasis of the Eurographics event depends a great deal on the submitted papers - if nobody likes the theme, the authors will submit papers on what interests them. The areas where you can influence the programme are the tutorials on the first two days and the invited speakers.
This year we had excellent value from the five invited speakers. Prof Nowacki in the Opening Session considered the conference theme in relation to Engineering Design. He saw the strengths of current CAD systems being in the area of databases and product description. The major limitations were lack of full integration, ineffective interaction and very little relevant visualisation of engineering information. The talk was illustrated by examples of his own work with an emphasis on ship design, a topical theme for Hamburg with its enormous harbour. Gerald Murch, a regular visitor to Eurographics, gave an excellent overview of the problems associated with colour matching between display and printer. A typical quote was thermal printing: a technology that should never have been invented due to the non-linearity of the colour interpolation on the device. He gave examples of how Tektronix are producing new colour models to solve the problems. Prof Peitgen gave an impressive interactive presentation on the impact of fractal geometry using a Macintosh connected to a SONY video system. Don Greenberg introduced the Turing test for visualisation presenting the real and computer generated scenes to the subject via video and asking the person to say which was which. Progress has been such that about 50% of the subjects believe the computer generated scene is real and vice versa. Jim Foley concluded the Conference with a talk on Next Generation User Interface Design showing the impact of Knowledge Engineering and representation on user interface design.
A new addition to the programme this year was a set of State of the Art (STAR) Reports which gave the current state of such areas as PHIGS PLUS, CGI, X-11, Geometric Modelling, UIMS, Visualisation etc. Enough time was allowed for a thorough presentation followed by half an hour for questions from the audience. Three sessions gave the current state of graphics in ESPRIT projects. These were warmly received. Having four and sometimes five parallel streams meant that participants were spoilt for choice and the only complaint was that not all the sessions could be attended.
Talking to Don Greenberg afterwards, he said how much he enjoyed the Conference and urged us not to let it get too large and out-of-hand so that it did not turn into another SIGGRAPH where the enormous size makes it more a circus than a conference.
Next year's conference is in Montreux, Switzerland. Fuller details of the dates will appear in the next issue and we will keep you informed of details of the programme as they firm up.
As indicated in Newsletter No 1, I am collecting information on the latest graphics products available on the market. I have evaluated several very interesting products and I have produced a detailed table summarising their important features. As this is too long to publish here I am presenting a brief summary of three selected packages.
These differ greatly in their user interfaces:
SuperChart is not an integrated program, it has only one function - Graph. To have the full set of required functions an additional package called Superimage is necessary. This supports other functions i.e. Draw, Editor and Word Chart. SuperChart is a spreadsheet type package and of the three it has the least functionality and the worst user interface. It is difficult to use and some commands are hidden and not logically placed in the menu. Export facilities are also very limited. For example, to produce a CGM file the picture has to be transferred first to SuperImage. In comparison, SuperImage is the absolute opposite - it is the best Drawing and Editing package I have seen. It has a very clear and easy-to-use interface. It has a support area on the left and right margin of the screen. The left, called the symbol bank, is used for storage of up to five symbols immediately available for placement in the main graphic area. The right displays the current program defaults and attributes for text, lines, figures also the current colour palette and percentage of available computer memory. These support areas are a very nice drawing features and can happily work with vector and and useful feature indeed. SuperChart also supports most of the presently available graphical metafiles, hardcopy devices and publishing packages.
GraphPlus is a fully integrated program (Graph, Draw, Editor and Word Chart) running under the Microsoft Windows environment and as a consequence has the advantages of any other Windows driven program such as consistent user interface and unified device drivers etc. As in all Windows driven programs, it features powerful export facilities which allows easy transfer of graphics files between different applications. For example, a selected chart can be moved from the graph window to the Clipboard, from there it can be pasted back to another graph window or another Windows application such as PageMaker. GraphPlus can also take advantage of Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), a feature of Windows that allows programs to link together and update automatically as each one changes - this makes it a direct partner to Microsoft spreadsheet Excell. GraphPlus also allows the user to create pictures in 104 separate pages and has hundreds of figures available from the libraries. So what is the draw back? So far, the only one is the lack of advanced curve fitting facilities. It does some, but at a very basic level.
SlideWrite Plus is also a fully integrated package which in comparison with the others has the richest range of features. The most distinctive is the extended curve fitting facilities with curve parameters and statistics reporting. The program can also generate a plot from a user supplied equation. The text facilities are very good - Greek and mathematical symbols are supported. The program also creates formulas with superscripts and subscripts. The import and export features are excellent with a great number of supported peripherals and interfaces to the most popular packages like WordPerfect, PageMaker, Ventura Publisher etc. The software has extended bit-map images. It supports a library of 420 symbols, icons and objects etc. It is very easy to operate as the user interface is clear and simple. Negatives: rotation command is rather awkward in use, also lack of the snap function which is very useful in drawing.
| Function | SlideWrite | GraphPlus | SuperChart/Image | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrated program | ||||
| Graph | * | * | * | |
| Draw | * | * | * | |
| Editor | * | * | * | |
| Word Chart | * | * | * | |
| Advanced Curve Fitting | * | |||
| Equation Plotting | * | |||
| Math and Greek Symbols | * | |||
| Method Of Operation | ||||
| Menu-driven: keyboard | * | * | * | * |
| Menu-driven: mouse | * | * | ||
| Command driven | * | |||
| Function keys driven | * | |||
| Extended memory supported | * | |||
| Microsoft Window environment | * | |||
| Range of features | ex | g | av | ex |
| Ease of use/user interface | g | g | p | ex |
| Overall presentation | g | g | av | ex |
| ex=excellent, g=good, av=average, p=poor | ||||
