Version 1.1.0 - ??? 2001

There were some huge changes from version 1.0.x to 1.1.0. You may want
to look over them if you are familiar with older surf versions.


Separation of Kernel and GUI
============================

The biggest change: From now on, the binary "surf" is just a kernel
which reads its input from script files or from stdin (via readline if
it's available) and executes them. The whole GUI work is now done by
"gtksurf", the separated new GTK+/Glade based graphical frontend to
surf.


Triangulation Support
=====================

It is highly recommended that you install GTS---the GNU Triangulated
Surface library---before compiling surf (GLIB 1.2 is needed, too,
because it's required by GTS), since then the surf kernel will have some
nifty new features allowing you to produce triangulated data of
algebraic surfaces. Images produced with this data (for example by
Geomview, a 3D image viewer) aren't as nice as the rendered images by
surf but you can realize stuff like interactive real-time animations.
gtksurf uses this feature in its Naviagation window, where you can
rotate/translate/scale surfaces interactively.

GTS is available from   http://gts.sourceforge.net

The new commands introduced for these triangulation features are
"triangulate_surface" and "save_three_d_image". You may want to read the
corresponding sections in the manual, too.


New file formats
================

Depending on the libraries and header files you have installed on your
system (they're all optional!), surf will have compiled-in support for
the following new file formats:

- 8bit PNG (libpng and png.h needed)

- 24bit true color TIFF images (libtiff and tiffio.h needed)

- If you have GTS and thus access to the triangulation mentioned above,
  you may save the 3D data as .srf files (the native GTS file format),
  ad OOGL/OFF files (the Geomview file format) or as .if files (the
  (OpenInventor file format).

Note: Support for the XWD format has been removed since that would have
required some (otherwise unnecessary) dependancies to X11 header files
and libraries.


Changes Concerning the Requirements
===================================

As a pure kernel, surf doesn't need any GTK+ or X libraries any more.
(gtksurf, the separate GUI for surf, *does* need them of course.)

It is highly recommended---but not mandatory---to have GTS, the GNU
Triangulated Surfaces library, installed, because otherwise you won't be
able to use any of the triangulation features mentioned above. (Note:
GTS itself needs GLIB.)

surf doesn't use threads any more, so the pthreads dependancy has
vanished.
