libgvectors Documentation

0.1

Introduction

Libgvectors is a C++ library for visualizing mathematical vectors. It provides three fundamental classes for achieving its purpose:

• GVector

  A class representing a three dimensional vector and providing fundamental operations for vector arithmetic.

• VisualVector

  Visualizes a GVector. It provides methods for projecting three dimensional vectors on a two dimensional plane.

• VectorStore

  Used to store and retrieve visual vectors in a hierarchical manner. It provides proxy methods to certain VisualVector methods used to draw vectors on a screen.

  Additionally, it provides an interface to save and load a vector store to and from file.

Libgvectors makes as little as possible assumptions about the graphics library used to draw vectors on a screen and is not bound to any particular graphics library.

Refer to http://www.guengel.ch/myapps/gvectors for an implementation using libgvectors, gtkmm, and cairomm.

Licensing

The software is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. See the COPYING file accompanying the tarball.

Supported Platforms

libgvectors can be built under Sun(TM) Solaris(TM) version 10 or later, FreeBSD, and Linux.

Optional libraries

• libgfileio

  If you want to save and load a vector store to and from a binary file, the libgfileio library is required.

  The library can be obtained by pointing your browser to http://www.guengel.ch/myapps/libgfileio

• libxml++

  If you want to be able to save and load a vector store to and from a XML file, the libxml++ library is required. Libgvectors supports the libxml++ API version 1.0 and 2.14.

  The library can be obtained by pointing your browser to http://libxmlplusplus.sourceforge.net

Installation

The usual

$ ./configure ; make ; make install

sequence. See the INSTALL file accompanying the tarball for further details.

Compilation and Linking

There are three ways to do this:

1. Manual

   Use the '-I', '-L', and '-l' flags of the compiler, for instance

   $ cc -I/usr/local/include/gvectors -L/usr/local/lib -lgvectors example.cc
   

2. pkg-config

   Libgvectors comes with a package config file (.pc). You could type for instance

   $ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs libgvectors` example.cc
   

3. Autoconf/Automake

   If you are using autoconf/automake for your project, then add to your configure.ac file

      PKG_CHECK_MODULES(SOMEAPP, libgvectors >= 0.1)
      AC_SUBST(SOMEAPP_CFLAGS)
      AC_SUBST(SOMEAPP_LIBS)
   

Homepage

Open the URL http://www.guengel.ch/myapps/libgvectors. in your browser.

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