Programming literature: "Hilbert Curves"

Mike Marchywka marchywka at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 25 11:27:27 CEST 2019


On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 08:39:08AM +0000, Taylor, P wrote:
> Doug McKenna wrote:
> 
> > After many years of both concentrated and sporadic efforts on a variety of fronts, my combined application and/or electronic book ("Hilbert Curves" and/or "Outside-In and Inside-Gone") is now available  in Apple's App Store for Apple's iPad (and iPhone, but more screen real estate is better).  Of interest to readers of this list, this app/book is, I believe, a first: it is self-typesetting on the user's device from TeX source code.  See <http://www.mathemaesthetics.com/HilbertCurves.html> for a few screen shots.  The typeset math of course looks great, though it is not very complicated (high-school level).  The app contains its own high-performance TeX-language interpreter, which I've been calling JSBox.  The TUGboat article I wrote a while back on how it traces itself is here:
> An interesting and innovative approach, Doug, but do you have plans to 
> develop it for other platforms (Windows, Android, whatever).  I have no 
> Apple devices, nor have I any interest in the same, but I am interested 
> in your work and would be interested in trying it (even paying for it !) 
> if it were available for platforms in which I have some interest.

There were a number of features mentioned that I thought were interesting. The idea that something compiled
is somehow inherently faster to display needs better exploration- maybe this is the beginning of the end
of blaoted binary formats :) It is often the case that calculations are faster than equivalent 
main memory accesses and smaller "code" may be faster to display- plus it is human readable if you
want to look at text instead of the fancy graphics. Interactive viewing, collapsing sections you 
don't care about into small titles instead full text is helpful with limited displays but
even with big displays and cluttered compositions that you may get in more spontaneous
genres like email. Image formats are another issue- models are much more versatile than
rendered stuff and you have to wonder how often jpeg, requiring some processing, is faster
than say bitmapped images or tiffs. Curious what you are using for models here. There are
a variety of image compression techniques that try to generate images from parameerized
models but if you have meaningful equations that is much better :) SVG may or may
not be the best sarting point. 

Curious to see what you found playing with this so far. 

I started something like this much more primitive just to see how selective display would work
for email and was happy even with that small improvement. 


> 
> Philip Taylor
> 

-- 

mike marchywka
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canton GA 30115
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marchywka at hotmail.com
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