
@l@b@cGeneral NDview Help

NDview is an extension of geomview for the purpose of viewing
higher dimensional objects.  In the authors' opinion,
learning to use NDview effectively goes hand
in hand with learning this particular kind of visualization
skill.  One place to start is the tesseract demo, which
interactively explores a typical rotation in four dimensions.

The basic philosophy behind NDview is that pictures of
projections  can help the user reconstruct in their own mind
a picture of the actual nd object.  (The computer is considered
incapable of creating the latter picture.)  Furthermore, that
a natural way to interact with higher dimensional objects is
to interact with their projections, and then translate that
interaction into actions on the nd objects themselves.

The NDview interface can help the user choose preferred projections
(see "environment") and allows the use of color to help convey 
additional information about the position of objects prior to
projection (see "colormap").  The remainder of this help document
is devoted to explaining the controls on the NDview main panel.

@b"environment":
Typically the user may want a particular set of projections working
together to view a given nd object.  The environment browser lists
some prefabricated possibilities, and the user may add more or
delete from the browser.  More exactly, an "environment" is a
geomview command file that records everything about some previous
geomview session (where the windows are placed, what objects are
present, but not anything about what the user did to get there.)

@b"add":
If at any point the user would like to save their current environment
clicking this button will prompt for a name for that environment
and a name for a file to save that information to.  (If you would like
to save the environment without adding it to the browser, use the
standard geomview save option for commands.)  Note that the contents
of the browser is saved in a different file, called ".ndview", and
stored in the directory that geomview is being run in.

@b"delete":
If the user wants to delete something from the browser, they can
select it and then press delete.  A warning message comes up that
the only thing that is deleted is the entry in the browser-- any
associated files are not removed.

@b"new window":
if the user wishes to specify a new view of the object, they may press
this button, and on the new panel specify what axes will determine
the projection.  The order does matter:  the first choice will
be assigned to geomview's usual x axis, the next to y, and the next to
z.  A cluster is the higher dimensional analogue of a 3d camera, for
a detailed explanation please see the manual page for NDview.

@b"colormap":
A common method to convey information about higher dimensions than
can fit in a lower dimensional picture is to use color to encode height,
just like in a topographical map.  The browser lists come possibilities
for how to encode a particular direction with color.  "w redblue" refers to
a colormap useful in four dimensions that colors vertices of objects
according to their height in the w, or fourth, coordinate, beginning
with red and descending to blue.  When the user clicks on one of the 
entries in the browser, the corresponding colormap is applied to 
the current camera, which is usually the one that the mouse encountered
last.

@b"add":
Similar to "add" for environments, only this time the colormap of the
current camera is saved and added to the browser.

@b"delete":
please see "delete" under "environment", above.

@b"new colormap":
this button starts up an interface for creating custom colormaps.  This
interface has (will have?) its own help panel for instructions on how 
this is done.

@b"demos":
this browser contains a list of external modules which make use of the
n-dimensional capabilities of geomview.  Each should have a help panel
of its own.  The authors are soliciting additions to this panel!

@b"help":
this panel pops up when the user presses the help button.  For more
detailed information on NDview, please see the manual pages.

@b"quit":
exits NDview.
