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who's designing clim 2.0

I have a comment about what I'd like to see in clim 2.0
and I'm a little concerned that others haven't spoken up.
The group that is designing clim has been very quiet.
I don't know who they are and they haven't been actively
seeking advice from users on this mailing list.
Nevertheless, there has been an enormous amount of
experience over the last 10 or 20 years with window
systems and interface building, so I am keeping my
fingers crossed that they are doing their best to 
incorporate this experience and are doing great things
for the rest of us.

I can see a spectrum of applications for clim from
pure text and building editors all the way to 3d
graphics for cad/cam and for games, for that matter.

Our lab is trying to create large systems that present
scientific and technical documents on the screen.
This means multi-fonts (e.g., Greek (and Hebrew for math))
and especially subscripts and superscripts in running
text and a somewhat richer model for full math equation
display.  Mike Lesk at Bellcore discovered, in his large
project with Amer Chem Soc that he needed seven levels
of vertical text positioning just to do chemical text
(baseline plus sub and super superscript plus
sub and super subscript plus normal sub and superscript.

The reason this needs clim is because these document 
systems have to be intelligent (there's knowledge and
hyper-links behind all those characters) so that in turn
needs smart systems built in CL/CLOS (and OODBMS?!!).

It goes without saying that all these technical texts need
graphics for all the many diagrams, but these are typically
2-d diagrams and clim seems to be strong enough in the 
graphic area for this.

There is one deficiency which should be addressed:
There should be the ability to present text rotated 
90 degrees as appears on the zillions of data graphs
and on some labeled drawings that are published every
year. (our field of biology publishes 300,000
*papers* every year  :-) !!

In summary:
  Who's designing clim 2.0?
  What are their goals - structure, function, features?
  Many of us need technical text displays.
  Basic 2-d graphics in clim seems adequate.
  We need 90 degree rotated text [we do faces  :-)  ].
  I hope others will speak up before 2.0 is frozen.

Thanks for CLIM and keep up the good work --
  and, you vendors,  we need sources! (thanks symbolics).

bob futrelle


   Prof. Robert P. Futrelle
   Biological Knowledge Laboratory
   College of Computer Science  161CN
   Northeastern University
   360 Huntington Ave.
   Boston, MA 02115

   (617)-437-2076
   Internet: futrelle@corwin.ccs.northeastern.edu





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