The Tesseract - Help

 

 

About

 

Tesseract, version 1.0 (2008), by Gennady Tsukanov.

This software is freeware and has no warranties of any kind.

 

Prerequisites

 

To run this software you need Microsoft .Net Framework 2 to be installed.

 

Overview

 

By default the Tesseract program launches in windowless mode and presents orthographic projection of rotating in four dimensional Euclid space tesseract (also known as 4D cube or 8-cell polytope). You can move it on desktop by moving mouse pointer when pressing and holding right mouse button. Also you can doubleclick tesseract faces by left mouse button to start OS commands defined for this face or to show its non-default image by default viewer. And certainly, you may press F1 key to show this help file.

 

To get more functionality you should switch to window mode (double click by right mouse button). In window mode you may:

*         Change size of the tesseract by changing size of the program window.

*         Change rotation definition (in second from left side field of bottom line of a toolbar):
Rotation: =coordinate_plane space rotation_step_in_radians [comma Rotation]. Run defined rotation forward or backward by left or right clicking of a wide green arrow button, one additional click in the same direction will stop rotation. Step defined rotation forward or backward by left or right clicking of a thin blue arrow button.

*         Set coordinate rotation forward or backward by left or right clicking of coordinate planes� buttons on top line of the toolbar. This rotation may be run in two modes: resetting the defined rotation or combining with the defined rotation, one additional click in the same direction will stop rotation. These modes are toggled by middle clicking of wide green arrow.

*         View tesseract from side of each coordinate plane by middle clicking button of coordinate planes in top line of the toolbar. Or set coordinate plane in first from left side field of bottom line of the toolbar).

*         Stop rotation and reset position of the tesseract to initial by clicking button with Enter sign.

*         Capture images of tesseract by clicking button with camera icon. Images will be saved in Images subfolder (relative to the executable file folder) in bmp format with indication of the capture time in file name. The size of the picture depends on the size of the program window.

*         Show/hide number identifiers of vertices and faces by clicking button with # sign.

*         Open "Set images, colors and commands" dialog by clicking button with "picture" icon. This dialog proposes grid and toolbar to:

-   Set image file path for default image.

-   Set image path for an individual face, adjust image relative to that face, set thumbnailing, set OS program and its arguments to be started when user clicks the face

-   Set color for background or make it transparent

-   Set transparency for the program window

-   Set drawing mode with face shading (according to distance to screen plane)

-   Clear all image set

-   Open image set from file (dataset XML format)

-   Load image set from a folder (according to sorting by file name)

-   Save image set to a file

*         Pushpin (set as topmost) the program window by clicking button with pushpin icon.

 

If in the folder with Tesseract.exe file there is file Tesseract.xml then it will be used as image set file. If no such file then Tesseract.* with extensions: jpg, bmp, png, gif (with preference in indicated order) will be used for default image. If no such file exists, the tesseract faces will be filled in white color.

 

Contacts

 

All comments about this software are welcome at gtsukanov@mail.ru.