New Features in Release 2.12

Release date: March 19, 2012.

Release 2.12 is now available on the Downloads page. Here are the most important new features:

• new client for integer hull computation
• interface to Sketch 3D/TikZ
• handling of fans with non-trivial lineality space
• unification of template parameters
• pipe shell
• multitude of minor editions and bugfixes

Two scripts simplify the computation of the convex hull of the lattice (integer) points in a polyhedron. The script will be described in more detail in the tutorial polymake and Optimization.

Polymake is now able to produce and display TikZ pictures via an interface to Sketch 3D. Here is a simple example:

sketch(cube(3)->VISUAL);
sketch(cube(3)->VISUAL, File=>"cube.sk");

With the second command one can export a polytope to a sketch input file. To get the TikZ code just call sketch.

The interface can handle most of the basic customization options like colors for facets and vertices as well as thickness, transparency, … (see also Tutorial for Visualization)

sketch(cube(3)->VISUAL(VertexThickness=>3, FacetColor=>"blue", FacetTransparency=>1));

The visual object now has three more options to customize the viewing parameters for the sketch output.

sketch(cube(3)->VISUAL(ViewPoint=>[1,2,3], ViewDirection=>[0,0,0], ViewUp=>[0,1,1]));

• ViewPoint is the point from where one is looking at the object (Default: [10,11,9]).
• ViewDirection is the point to where one is looking (Default: [0,0,0]).
• ViewUp defines which direction should be up (Default: [0,1,0]).

(see also Sketch 3d documentation)

Minor improvements in the application fan include the possibility to handle fans with non-trivial lineality space and the ability to efficiently extract individual cones from a fan.

On the Perl side all coordinate based big object types (such as Polytope, Cone, Fan) as well as the related small object types (such as Vector, Matrix) now have Rational as the default template parameter. It may thus be omitted.