41–50 of 217 posts
This surprisingly less philosophical than I was expecting. There is no such thing as a perfect circle, it's a platonic ideal and lives in the Nous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just because there are no primitives for a circle… Is a 360° arc not a circle? %!PS /newpath 100 100 50 0 360 arc stroke showpage
Yes, but as someone else commented the arc is internally based on bézier curves. How accurate thee circle would be by plotting is probably dependent on the trigonometric table built in to the postscript interpreter, but at least it would be mathematically possible to make an accurate circle where it's actually not even possible to express a perfect circle with bézier curves.
fact: circles are actually squares that have successfully deceived you. You have been bested by a shape.
If you play the game Quake 3 Arena, which was, I think, the first game to use bezier curves in 3d rendering, so that a column or arch could dynamically adjust how many polygons are used depending on view distance, the columns are visibly not round! Not something most people notice unless they are looking for it.
> Furthermore, the human vision system is a bit weird and perfect circles look vertically elongated. You have to make them non-circular for people to consider them properly circular. Does any one have a link to a perfect circle, I'd love to see if it has the proposed effect on me.
As someone who's spent a decent amount of time writing "output to pdf" routines, I would never in a million years choose pdf as an interchange format for anything at all.
What would you put at the top?
.PS is pretty fancy, although, just because it is probably saying “this is basically a PDF but from the olden days.”
Just like how cows don’t look like cows on film![0]
circles exist with NURBs, iirc. Now at some point you have to turn on individual pixels, so ....