I've been using jmol quite a bit lately in Sage for drawing 3d mathematical surfaces. One thing I really miss is the ability to have nice meshes (including arbitrary meshes) on a surface. Currently Jmol allows a mesh option to pmesh surfaces, but that only draws a specific grid that is hard to see (it is the same color as the surface, but lighter or something).
Probably the easiest change would be to make the mesh default to black lines (like the black lines for contour plots on cut planes). That would make the mesh lines much easier to see. Seeing the mesh lines often really helps us mathematicians (especially those of us teaching). A very nice functionality to add would be the ability to draw arbitrary meshes on surfaces, similar to what is implemented here (but as black lines on the surface, rather than the crude approximation constructed here): http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/attachment/ticket/5511/mesh_function.jpeg. I think Mathematica has a nice interface to these sorts of things: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/MeshFunctions.html We (Sage) can take care of the interface to draw meshes. What we'd need from jmol is the ability to draw a line *on* a surface and have it look like the contour lines look like on a plane. Maybe for each triangle in the surface, we could give a list of lines to draw on that triangle by specifying (for each line) the two edges the line crosses and the fraction of the distance along the edge to make the intersection between the line and the edge of the triangle. What do you think? Thanks, Jason ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ Jmol-users mailing list Jmol-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-users
