KSEG 0.402 review

KSEG is a Free (GPL) interactive geometry program for exploring Euclidean geometry

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 641K Developer: Ilya Baran

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KSEG is a Free (GPL) interactive geometry program for exploring Euclidean geometry. It runs on Unix-based platforms (according to users, it also compiles and runs on Mac OS X and should run on anything that Qt supports).

You create a construction, such as a triangle with a circumcenter, and then, as you drag verteces of the triangle, you can see the circumcenter moving in real time. Of course, you can do a lot more than that--see the feature list below.

KSEG can be used in the classroom, for personal exploration of geometry, or for making high-quality figures for LaTeX. It is very fast, stable, and the UI has been designed for efficiency and consistency.

I can usually make a construction in KSEG in less than half the time it takes me to do it with similar programs. Despite the name, it is Qt based and does not require KDE to run.

KSEG was inspired by the Geometer's Sketchpad, but it goes beyond the functionality that Sketchpad provides.

Here are some key features of "KSEG":
Fast core which can support large constructions
Free/GPL-runs on Linux (and probably most other systems which support Qt)
Supports multiple languages
Fully Documented
Construction of points, segments, rays, lines, circles, and arcs
Make measurements
Transformations (rotation, translation, scaling, reflection)
Construction of adaptively sampled loci for better quality and speed
Reverse dragging
Infinite undo/redo
Ability to easily redefine points to "edit" drawings
Easy to use editable scripting/macro with support for recursion
Pretty formulas for calculations-with my libkformula
Pretty colors, fonts, etc.
View panning/zooming and multiple simultaneous views
Export view to image file, including antialiased option
Printing
Selection Groups--group a bunch of objects, then select them later with two clicks

Languages so far:

Portuguese -- Jorge Barros de Abreu
French -- Jean-Philippe Martin (UI) and Marie-Paule Canou, Jos?e Goyer, Mich?le Sidobre (Help)
German -- Andreas Goebel
Norwegian Bokmal -- Skolelinux
Hungarian -- Gabor Nagy
Spanish -- Eduardo Due?ez
Dutch -- Bram Schoenmakers
Italian -- Giancarlo Bassi
Partial Japanese -- Linux Magazine (ASCII) (UI) Yokota Hiroshi (Help)
Welsh -- Kevin Donnelly
Turkish -- Vildan Ozturk
Russian -- Anton Petrunin
Chinese -- Xu Xianghua

Requirements:
You will need at least Qt 3.x. Qt 2.x may work, but I haven't tested it much. If your system is strange, you may need to edit the makefile to compile it (but don't worry, only the first 6 lines are relevant).

What's New in This Release:
Added patch to export SVG
Minor bugfixes to allow Russian translation