CGAL users discussion list

["Eivind LM" <>]

I would like to make a little comment on this, humble as the new user I  
am. First of all, I must say the CGAL documentation is really outstanding.  
You have obviously put a lot of work into documenting everything.

The only thing I'm missing is a quick way to look up information about a  
given type. When I'm writing my little program and have a pointer to an X,  
I always wonder for example what method I can call on X to give me Y (e.g  
X is a Face_handle and Y is a point). Even if I have read the  
documentation for X before, I need a way to recall it quickly, since I  
don't always remember from last time I used an X what members it has, or  
what section of the manual it's documented.

All members of all types seems to be very well documented already, the  
thing is that it's just (for me at least) a barrier to have to identify  
the right section of the manual first. I have to think in order to find  
what I need. It's not very much thinking involved, but it's enough to get  
me slightly distracted from the programming. Since I only have one of  
those good ol' single-threaded brains, with slow and lossy context  
switches, I perefer if my brain would not have to be involved in finding  
the reference :)

So I think one long HTML page that lists all types in CGAL, which links  
directly to the paragraph that describes each type, would be very useful.  
I'm thinking of something like the lower left frame of the java sdk api  
[1] ("All classes").

Then I could autonomously open this index page, search on the page with my  
browser to find the type in question, and finally just click a link to see  
all relevant information about my type.

How do you like the idea?

Best regards,
Eivind LM

[1] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:27:00 +0200, <>  
wrote:

> Section 1 of the user manual of 3D Triangulation is about  
> representation, and it says just after a few lines
> ---------
> As in the underlying combinatorial triangulation (see Chapter 28), edges  
> (1-faces) and facets (2-faces) are not explicitly represented: a facet  
> is given by a cell and an index (the facet i of a cell c is the facet of  
> c that is opposite to the vertex with index i) and an edge is given by a  
> cell and two indices (the edge (i,j) of a cell c is the edge whose  
> endpoints are the vertices of c with indices i and j). See Figure 28.1.
> ---------
> and this is written again in the introduction of the ref manual
>
> And the typedef for Facet, mentioned by Laurent in his answer, is  
> documented at the beginning of the ref manual of Triangulation_3 and  
> TDS_3.
>
> So, for this precise question, I think there is no way the manual could  
> give a better answer.
>
> Andreas Fabri wrote:
> > Hi Matthieu,
> >  My question about the quality of the documentation was serious.
> > Did you happy programming before reading the documentation (what
> > I admittedly often do), or did you try to find it in the manual,
> > and gave up after a couple of minutes?
> >  andreas
> >   Matthieu Chavent wrote:
> >
> > > Thanks to Andreas Fabri and Laurent Rineau and sorry for neewbies  
> > > questions.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > >          Matthieu Chavent.
> > >
> > > Laurent Rineau a écrit :
> > >
> > > > On Tuesday 16 October 2007 17:16:07 Matthieu Chavent wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Good afternoon,
> > > > > I use triangulation_3 and and use a facet_iterator. I would like to  
> > > > > know
> > > > > if it possible to retrieve from a facet the two cell_handles of the  
> > > > > two
> > > > > cells which  have the facet in common, in a simple manner.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Well, I quote here the definition of Facet, from the reference page  
> > > > "TriangulationDataStructure_3":
> > > >
> > > > "typedef std::pair<Cell_handle, int> Facet;
> > > >        (c,i) is the facet of c opposite to the vertex of index i."
> > > >
> > > > So, if "f_it" is a facet iterator, "f_it->first" is one of the two  
> > > > cells you request, and "f_it->first->neighbor(f_it->second)" is the  
> > > > other one (see the reference page  
> > > > "TriangulationDataStructure_3::Cell" for a description of  
> > > > Cell::neighbor).
> > > >
> > > > Best regards,