Ipelets for the Convex Polygonal Geometry

Abstract

There are many structures, both classical and modern, involving convex polygonal geometries whose deeper understanding would be facilitated through interactive visualizations. The Ipe extensible drawing editor, developed by Otfried Cheong, is a widely used software system for generating geometric figures. One of its features is the capability to extend its functionality through programs called Ipelets. In this media submission, we showcase a collection of new Ipelets that construct a variety of geometric objects based on polygonal geometries. These include Macbeath regions, metric balls in the forward and reverse Funk distance, metric balls in the Hilbert metric, polar bodies, the minimum enclosing ball of a point set, and minimum spanning trees in both the Funk and Hilbert metrics. We also include a number of utilities on convex polygons, including union, intersection, subtraction, and Minkowski sum (previously implemented as a CGAL Ipelet). All of our Ipelets are programmed in Lua and are freely available.