To: likewise!research!cvw@uunet.UU.NET Cc: likewise!research!td@uunet.UU.NET, don In-reply-to: 's message of Tue, 13 Oct 87 18:05:41 edt <8710132205.AA09964@likewise.ENGNET> Subject: How hard can it be to draw a pie chart? --text follows this line-- From: Date: Tue, 13 Oct 87 18:05:41 edt Apparently-To: uunet!brillig.umd.edu!don I found the paper. It's called `How hard can it be to draw a pie chart?' by Diane L. Souvaine (Rutgers University) and Christopher J. Van Wyk (research!cvw) It shows that when the order of sectors is not fixed, the problem of arranging a list of sectors of given size so that each contains a horizontal line of given length is NP-hard. Great -- thanks for the reference! I'd appreciate a copy of the paper. I've been thinking about how to do more intelligent pie menu label placement, that minimizes menu size while keeping the labels from overlapping. As the giant 360 item pie menu shown in my video tape demonstrated, positioning the labels around an inner radius that is a linear function of the number of labels can end up demanding more real estate than Jim Bakker shopping for amusement parks. (Not that everybody shouldn't have a screen big enough to display such menus!) One thing I was thinking of experimenting with was "2 1/2 dimensional dynamics", where labels are attracted to their places by springs, but are pushed away from each other when they overlap. This could also be applied to speech balloons, used to annotate a picture. There would be "uphill" regions of the picture that should not be covered up, and the balloons, which are anchored in place by rubber-band-like pointers, fight it out until none of them overlap. I think it would be neat to use with graphical hypertext, and other things that need dynamically positioned popup windows that don't obscure each other. There's a lot to be done with arbitrarily shaped windows! (Just leaf through a MAD Magazine!) -Don