Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!bionet!national-institute-for-medical-research.mrc.ac.uk!s_pyke
From: s_pyke@national-institute-for-medical-research.mrc.ac.uk (S. Pyke)
Newsgroups: bionet.software
Subject: digitising tablet software
Message-ID: <8906191649.AA07937@nimsn41.>
Date: 19 Jun 89 16:49:49 GMT
Sender: daemon@NET.BIO.NET
Lines: 31

I have been asked to come up with a solution to the following problem by a
colleague. I am loathe to write something myself 1) because software
development is not relly my field and 2) because I'm sure someone must
have done this sort of thing already better than I could. If anyone knows
of commercially available software to help or of public domain algorithms
I'd be pleased to hear from you.

In essence the problem is the sort of thing a draughtsman might want to
deal with. Data is kept in the form of closed shapes drawn in the plane
of a very large piece of paper (in the region half a metre by two
metres). The idea is to trace round these shapes on a digitising block,
label each shape with a unique tag and then calculate certain
characteristic quanties like area and geometric centre. Finally, it
ought to be possible to relate the location of all the closed shapes to
one another, say by giving relative coordinates of their centres.

In principal it shouldn't be too difficult. On the other hand the sheer
size of these 'graphs' is a very real problem.

If anyone has any ideas I'd be pleased to hear from you.

Thanks,
____________________________________________________________________________
  Stephen Pyke                     JANET:             s_pyke@uk.ac.mrc.nimr
  Lab. Mathematical Biology        UUCP:
  Nat. Inst. Medical Research      DARPA:  s_pyke%mrc.nimr@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
  The Ridgeway
  Mill Hill
  LONDON NW7 1AA                   Tel:                   (+44) 01-959 3666
  U.K.                                                            ext. 2297
____________________________________________________________________________