One of the problems I described in the last entry was slicing a polygon in two. Doing this required a pretty good understanding of high-school geometry. But it now works in the demo on this page.
But having more than one polygon creates a new problem. As you move your mouse over the page you have to decide over which polygon you are moving, or on which corner-point you are clicking. And there might be hundreds of polygons or points on a page, and you have only a few milliseconds to decide between them. Imagine that you have some way to test "is the point where the mouse is inside this polygon"? or "is the mouse over a corner point of this polygon"? If you have,say, 100 polygons, you will have to call those two tests 100 times whenever the mouse moves even a small distance. And that will be much too slow if you want the interface to be responsive.
So I decided to divide the page-image up into four rectangles (NW, NE, SW, SE) containing either at most four points, or nothing. If there is nothing then the rectangle acts as a container for four smaller rectangles that are inside it. And as the mouse can only be in one place at a time it can only ever be over one rectangle that has any points. As well as the points each such rectangle also contains a list of polygons that overlap with some part of it. Deciding which rectangle you are in is easy because they are nested. So now it is a simple matter to test "is the mouse currently over a polygon or a corner-point?" because there will only be a few of them in each rectangle. The only problem with this is that as you edit the polygons and the points the rectangles must be kept up to date. But that is a solvable problem. Click on the image below to see it in action:
So now what I have is point-delete, point-add, point-drag, and polygon-anchor (freeze and highlight points), polygon-highlight and polygon-split. That's enough to try to create a usable GUI for editing the output of the TILT recognition process. And that, of course, is the next step.
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