Introduction to Poincaré The Underlying Mathematics Panels and Math Text Interactive Geometry The Poincaré Toolbox

The Poincaré Toolbox

The helper application approach was also useful for including geometric tools for constructing objects in the Poincaré universe sketches.
These tools were built from GSP scripts instead of sketches. Sketchpad allows users to create scripts to perform a series of operations, and to save them as reusable tools. The current version of Sketchpad stores these scripts inside individual sketches; in the earlier version, they were saved as external files. You set up your browser to download the scripts but not open them; then you placed them in a special Toolbox folder inside the GSP Script Tool folder. This made the script-tools appear in the tools menu for all the Poincaré sketches, ready for use.

Some of the tools were designed as direct Poincaré analogues of the standard GSP tools. For example, to bisect the angle formed by two Poincaré rays, you selected a point on the first ray, the vertex and a point on the second ray (just as you did to bisect a euclidean angle with the usual GSP tools) and the bisector automatically appeared.

Other tools performed constructions specific to Poincaré geometry. The asymptotic line tool, for example, constructed a line through a point asymptotic to a given line in one of its directions. The common perpendicular tool constructed a line perpendicular to both of two given divergent Poincaré lines.
The tools were organized into folders corresponding to the organization of some of the GSP tools: a Construct folder, a Measure folder and a Transform folder. There was also a folder for auxilliary scripts, used in constructing other tools. The Toolbox setup page contained a complete list of tools and descriptions of their effects. The Toolbox icon appeared at multiple locations on the pages as a link to the setup page.

 

Introduction to Poincaré The Underlying Mathematics Panels and Math Text Interactive Geometry The Poincaré Toolbox