Monday, 22 Dec 2008

Positive Y

The excellent Cairo graphics library has a simple function to draw arcs; in C it’s cairo_arc(); from java-gnome it’s Context’s arc() method, etc.

Quite unsurprisingly they define increasing angles as going from the positive x axis on toward the positive y axis. Nothing unusual about that. The only thing that was surprising is that they even mention this in their documentation.

I should know better.

What I totally missed was the implication of this. I didn’t quite clue in that the positive y direction in screen positioning and page drawing is down, and so increasing angles go clockwise. Using cr.arc() to go from 0 to say π/3 radians does not give a rise of 60° like I expected; it gives this:

Whoa. This is not the counter-clockwise increasing θ like we’re all used to seeing in normal Cartesian or Polar co-ordinates. But it is indeed increasing toward the positive y axis. Oops. Oh well :)

So I made this illustration and added it to the documentation for Context’s arc() method. Really it’s mostly about pointing out which direction positive y is, but when I’ve learned something like this the hard way, I do my best to try and incorporate that knowledge into our public API. With any luck others can be spared my folly.

Drawn with Cairo, of course!

AfC

Update: Some people have pointed out that you can use a transformation matrix, and if you happen to (say) mirror across the horizontal axis then the clockwise notion would no longer apply. Fair enough; but if you have forgotten that +y starts out going down, then you’re not going to think to do such a flip in the first place.

cairo-arcs, posted by Andrew Cowie in software/java-gnome at 2008-12-21T15:47:07Z

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