Visualization on MacOS

[ren]

I think there are two problems with the visualization routines on macs (at least the newer ones):

1. surf does not seem to compile (or at least not easily, see following mail from our tech staff):

From: Ronald Kriemann <Ronald.Kriemann@mis.mpg.de>
Date: 2017-06-22 20:03 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: Matthew
To: Oliver Heller <Oliver.Heller@mis.mpg.de>
Cc: yueren@mailhost.mis.mpg.de


Hi,

> wäre es noch möglich surf + surfer auf allen Macbooks zu installieren?
>
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/surf/files/surf/1.0.6/
> https://imaginary.org/program/surfer
>
> Es sind zwei kleine Bibliotheken zur (interaktiven) Visualisierung von
> algebraischen Kurven und Flächen.

surf kompiliert nicht auf den Macs. Es nutzt GTK/Glib, welche ich per
brew installiert habe (Version 2.x). Dort findet er aber Header-Dateien
nicht (und ich auch nicht).

Ich vermute, da surf doch _sehr_ alt ist, gab es mittlerweile leichte
Änderungen beim kompilieren mit GTK/Glib, zumal letzteres auf Mac auch
nicht die erste Wahl bei Oberflächen ist.

RGDS
  Ronald

2. calling surfer using the command 'surfer' is no longer possible (at least with the standard installation), instead one needs to use 'open -a surfer'.

3. surfer (with the change in 2.) always starts with its default quadric, not with the input polynomials. Is this a MacOS only problem or does it exist on other systems (tried installing it on ubuntu, but it crashed on startup)?

[hannes]

3 different problems: ad 1.) the gui of surf uses gtk-1.2. If you do not have gtk-1.2 (which is NOT compatible with 2.x),

disable the gui, which nobody needs:

./configure --disable-gui --disable-cups

The sources have also a problem with newer compilers, find a fixed version at ​ftp://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/pub/Math/Singular/misc/surf-1.0.6-gcc6.tar,gz

ad 2.) The standard installation of surfer does not put the surfer binary at a place in the standard path,

something like sudo ln -s /Application/......surfer /usr/local/bin should help (do not know the internal structure of the surfer application)

ad 3.) This is a consequence of 2: if you do not call a program but start an application

(as open -a does), no commandline arguments are passed (which provide the surface to draw)

Did this help?

[ren]

Thanks for the advice, I've forwarded it to our tech crew.

Regarding 3., I admit that I misunderstood the open command:

• it does not simulate starting the application and opening the file with the application
• it is supposed to simulate a double-click on the file

For the common programs, this obviously works fine (e.g. "open -a preview xyz.pdf" opens xyz.pdf in preview), but surfer is unable to open the .jsurf files it created through double-clicks.