[kde-edu]: kig: trace of a point and macro argument prompts

[Maurizio Paolini]

Dear Salvetti, (magari potremmo continuare in italiano, ma finche' siamo sulla ml...)

thank you for your email; for both questions I think that Pino Toscano is
more suited than myself to answer.

The 'trace of a point' was indeed present in 'kgeo' which was the ancestor
of kig; than it was substituted by the 'locus' object.  However I understand
that the 'trace' of a point could be interesting in a number of circumstances
and *maybe* also not too hard to add (although this is out of my field of
expertize).

Concerning the second question: I also tried to mimic the structure of a
builtin macro in the "macros.kigt" file, and it works!

You have to pay attention however to the closing tag of <input ...>, note the
difference between:

   <input requirement="point" id="1" />   (what you find in macros.kigt)

and

   <input requirement="point" id="1">     (in a builtin macro)

Note that the "/" character is no longer present, and indeed the tag is
in the latter case closed by a corresponding "</input>".

Of course your suggestion to enrich the wizard to allow for entering these
strings remains valid!

Also note that development of 'kig' is continuing on the development svn
repository in view of the upcoming kde 4; however there is a parallel
svn 'branch' (branches/kig/post-kde-3.5/...) containing all the new features
for a kde 3.5 environment.  We (at our department) will from time to time
prepare an 'rpm' of this development versione that can be install on a 
Fedora core 4 installation.  You can find these rpms in
http://dmf.unicatt.it/~paolini/kig/RPMS/, wait a couple of days of
an updated build.

There are many new features, among the others:
- conic arcs
- cubic functions ( y = p(x) with p of degree 3 )
- use of numeric and boolean labels, (such as the x coordinate of a point,
  the length of a segment, ...) that can be used as input to python scripts
  and can be the output of a python script
- 'intelligent' construction of the other intersection of a line and a conic/circle
  or of two circles when one of the intersections is already known

Cheers,
Maurizio

On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:57:08PM +0100, Davide G. M. Salvetti wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> I'm a new user of kig, and I like it a lot: a big thank to its
> developers!
> 
> I would like to ask for a couple of things:
> 
>   - Is it possible to enable the "trace" of a point, so that when it is
>     dynamically moved it draws its path across the screen?  (I see one
>     can draw locuses, which is very very nice, but this is not what I'm
>     referring to.)
> 
>   - Is it possible to have macros prompt the user with arbitrary strings
>     when asking for their arguments (e.g., "input the first point of the
>     segment you want to divide by the golden ratio")?  The wizard does
>     not ask for them to be input, but I see builtin macros like
>     "circle_by_center_and_line.kigt" have "<UseText>" and
>     "<SelectStatement>"; I seem to be unable to do the same, however: if
>     I write (like in Emacs) a .kigt using these tags and then import it,
>     the tags are but ignored.
> 
> I'm still exploring kig, so maybe I just missed the way to do these
> things; otherwise, please consider this mail as a wishlist request. :-)

Documentation of kig is now quite outdated, unfortunately.