The design of LINETOOL, a geometric editor

Abstract

We describe the design of LINETOOL, a geometric editor. Researchers in the areas of computational geometry, robotics and algebraic computation need a graphical editor for composing geometric objects which does more than simply turn pixels on and off on the screen. This system will be a tool to help researchers make and demolish conjectures, and to experiment with ideas. Our editor will allow users to define geometric scenes by declaring geometric objects built up from constants, dependent and independent variables, and geometric constraints. The system will solve for the constraints, and display the resulting scene. The user may then make queries about spatial relationships between components of geometric objects in the scene, which will be answered correctly, that is, without errors due to numerical approximations.