3.4 Loading Objects Into Geomview

There are several ways to load an object into Geomview.

the Files panel

If you click the Load button in Geomview's Main panel, the Files panel will appear.

Figure 3.2: The Files Panel.

This panel lets you select a file from a variety of directories. The top of the panel is a standard Motif file browser. Below this is a list of directories on geomview's standard search path; click on one of these to browse files in that directory.

To select a file, double-click on its name in the browser at upper right, or click on its name and press the <Enter> key, or type the file's name into the text box at the bottom of the browser and press <Enter>.

If the selected file contains OOGL geometric data, it will be added to the geomview Targets browser. If it contains GCL commands instead, the file will be interpreted. See GCL.

When the Files panel first appears, the directory selected in the directory browser is the current directory — the one from which you invoked Geomview. The file browser shows all the files in this directory, including ones that are not Geomview files. If you try to load a file that doesn't contain either an OOGL object or Geomview commands, Geomview will print out an error message.

The directory browser also lists a second and third directory in addition to the current directory. The second one, which ends in data/geom, is the Geomview example data directory. This contains a wide variety of sample objects. It also contains several subdirectories. In particular, the hyperbolic and spherical subdirectories have sample hyperbolic and spherical objects, respectively. Directory entries in the browser look just like file entries; to view a subdirectory, click on it.

The third directory shown in the directory browser, which ends in geom, contains several subdirectories with other Geomview files in them. These are used less frequently than the ones in the data/geom directory.

You can change the list of directories shown the Files panel's directory browser by using the set-load-path command; see (set-load-path ...).

the < keyboard shortcut:

If you type < in any Geomview window, the Load panel will appear. This is a small version of the Files panel; it contains a text field in which you can enter the name of a file to load (or a GCL command surrounded by parentheses). After typing the name of the file to load, type <Enter>; Geomview will load the file as if you had loaded it with the Add button in the Files panel. If, after bringing up the small load panel with <, you decide you want to use the larger Files panel after all, press the File Browser button.

Figure 3.3: The Load Panel.

geometry loading commands:

The load, geometry, new-geometry, and read GCL commands allow you to load an object into Geomview; See GCL. See (load ...). See (new-geometry ...). See (read ...).