Monday, April 6, 2015

Dynamic Zoom in LispWorks' CAPI

Using the LispWorks' CAPI, I have implemented a simple program to demonstrate the basic elements in the implementation of a 2D dynamic zoom feature. The program is basically uninteresting except for the dynamic zoom implementation. You can start with the code immediately, or skip to the other side for a few comments and refer back.



Every time the user clicks the left button (:button-1), the mouse location is trapped and turned into a "model" location for a line starting position. If the user presses the right button (:button-3) the common terminal point for all of the lines is changed—the same principle of storing a "model" point is followed. Basically it is a spider with as many legs as you want originating from whatever point you select.

When the program commences, the top-left corner is (0, 0) and view scale is 1:1. The rolling of the scroll wheel of the mouse will change both of these parameters by scaling relative to the current location of the mouse pointer. Since the scroll event does not appear to provide a means to get the current mouse pointer location, I am tracking the mouse :motion "gesture" (basically an "event") and storing the pointer location, in screen coordinates, as is moves.

The change-start (I guess I should have said "add-start"—ah, scope creep) and change-center handler functions do basically the same thing. Using the current mouse position (these two handlers do receive mouse position information), determine the model point corresponding to the screen position of the mouse. The top-left corner is an actual ("model") location. So the model location that corresponds to the given screen coordinates is the top-left corner plus the model distance between the mouse pointer and the top left corner of the screen. Thus, \(M' = (M/s + TL)\), where \(M'\) is the model location. We manipulate the same formula to obtain screen coordinates (\(M\)) from the model coordinates when we display to the screen.

The part that is a little trickier is to adjust the top-left corner when dynamic zoom is applied so that you can maintain the mapping between model and screen coordinates. This is an important part of change-scale's job. Our basic formula is
$$TL_i + A_i = TL_f + A_f,$$ where \(TL_i, TL_f\) are the initial and final top-left corners (i.e., before and after zoom) and \(A_i, A_f\) are the initial and final distances between the model position of the mouse and the top-left corner. In other words, zooming does not change the mouse location in either screen or model coordinates. Hence,
$$TL_f = TL_i + A_i - A_f = TL_i + M {{s_f - s_i}\over{s_f s_i}},$$where \(s_i, s_f\) are the initial and final scale factors.

LispWorks Personal Edition for non-commercial use is available here: http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/.