It's unfortunate that tachyon isn't maintained properly. It's a nice piece of software. It looks like it has been adopted by VMD (software developed by the biophysics group at Illinois -- it looks like the software is opensource and available without cost, but is under a restrictive licence, so can never be widely supported/distributed by distributions), so based on that it doesn't look good for tachyon becoming properly supported.
I can see how "Playwright" is an attractive option since it co-opts the renderer that is already available in modern browsers. It is definitely a nice option to have because it should produce pictures that exactly match what people are producing in the browser. While currently it is probably well-supported, I could see how longer term this is going to be a rather fragile solution, because we'd be dependent on an interface to communicate with a browser. I assume the proposal wouldn't mean that we'd ship a browser with sagemath? I almost never use 3D plotting machinery myself (the last time I tried to use threejs it was for a demo and it was flaky in the browser -- it ended up not working when I needed it, but it did work afterwards), but it would seem to me one would mainly want an export method to write a scene so that well-established rendering software like blender (which I think can run from the commandline) can process it. It would then not be sagemath's role to provide the rendering software, much in the same way that we don't package a pdf viewer either -- we could provide functionality to produce images assuming "blender" is available on the path, though. That would replace one role that tachyon could be used for (although I'm not sure how many people have used sagemath+tachyon to produce publication-quality pictures. On Monday 19 August 2024 at 17:13:29 UTC-7 Matthias Koeppe wrote: > jupyter-jsmol > <https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/spkg/jupyter_jsmol.html#spkg-jupyter-jsmol> > > is the current standard package providing javascript version of Jmol (which > I proposed to demote to optional in > https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/qKqTmLzHAbg, > https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/38504). I propose to demote it to > "optional". (In > https://groups.google.com/g/sage-devel/c/qKqTmLzHAbg/m/OwGjF4GiBQAJ > (2020), Antonio Rojas already asked if there is any reason for not making > jsmol optional too because three.js > <https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/spkg/threejs.html#spkg-threejs> > is our default 3d renderer.) > > tachyon > <https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/spkg/tachyon.html#spkg-tachyon> > is a standard package providing a raytracer, dating back to 1994. It has a > precarious maintenance status. Fedora has orphaned this package, and it is > not available in the current release 40 ( > https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/tachyon), Debian has an extensive set > of patches that have not been upstreamed ( > https://sources.debian.org/patches/tachyon/0.99~b6+dsx-12/). The Arch > Linux package (https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/tachyon/) is > maintained by Antonio Rojas; sage is listed as the only package depending > on it. I propose to demote this package to optional as well. > > Jmol (not jupyter-jsmol) and Tachyon serve the purpose of saving 3d > graphics as png files, in particular for our PDF documentation. > I propose to replace this function (exclusively provided by these two > packages in Sage) by using the tool Playwright, which installs a browser > such as Chromium and screenshots an arbitrary webpage as a PNG file. By > using it on a three.js rendering of 3d graphics, we can thus save the 3d > graphics as a PNG file. This is PR > https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/38509 (needs review). This is much > heavier-weight technology than tachyon, but it has excellent mainstream > maintenance status. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/25152eb8-763d-4905-85ad-b25232bd23fcn%40googlegroups.com.
