When I saw the ANSI approved, printed version of IGES 5.3 last February, I nearly had a melt-down. Even though I was credited on the cover as "IGES Figure Editor", I did not see the camera-ready copy before it went to the printer … the last draft that I saw was dated 1995-12-01 (Gaithersburg, 12/95).

Why am I so upset? Look at page 125, "Figure 27. F126X.IGS Example of Rational B-Spline Curve Entity". The "X" in the name means that this is one of the IGES files that can be used to test IGES translators. (See page 8, "1.8 Illustrations") You're supposed to compare a plot of your translation of the IGES file with the figure in the specification/standard, but the rendering of this puppy isn't even close.

As well as being geometrically distorted, the DOTTED lines connecting the control points cannot be seen for 80% of their length - several segments are missing, so the control points look like very large dust spots picked up during reproduction.

THIS FIGURE IS NOT JUST WRONG, IT IS MISLEADING TO AN IMPLEMENTOR!

Look at page 183, "Figure 52. Parameters of the CSG Sphere Entity". You don't even need to compare this with any of the six previous versions of IGES in which it appears. It's a picture of a "sphere".

*** THAT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A CIRCLE, NOT AN ELLIPSE!! ***

And I won't even talk about page 161, "Figure 47. Examples of the Boundary Entity".

But what really made me angry was page 484, "Figure 135. F40635X.IGS Examples defined using the underscore and overscore properties". The text string "Both" is supposed to have a line over it just like the one under it, and you can't tell which characters are underlined in the text string "Overlapping".

THIS FIGURE IS NOT JUST WRONG, IT IS MISLEADING TO AN IMPLEMENTOR!

I didn't make a big case of it in February, 1997. But now I find that USPro is selling an IGES 5.3 CD-ROM which was made by SCANNING THE PRINTED DOCUMENT, so the quality of the *UNCORRECTED* illustrations is even worse. And I don't know how they can claim that scanned pages of text in PDF format is a "fully linked hypertext version of the specification".

I understand that it was done with PDF to keep people from printing the pages directly from the CD-ROM. This was done over the objections of members of the IGES Project who thought that it should be hyperlinked by using HTML. USPro seems to have forgotten that the LaTeX source files for IGES 5.0 were published on a CD-ROM by NIST in November, 1990, along with a TeX viewer for .DVI files.

Last week I approached Chuck Stark at SCRA about correcting the renderings. He asked me to supply them, and said that he would reprint the pages for people who had already purchased copies and make sure that future printings had the correct renderings.

I told him that I had color renderings of them available for viewing on the Web, and asked if he would put an apology on the USPro Web site and point to the correct renderings (IN COLOR!) on mine. He told me that the USPro pages only point to members' pages. I reminded him that WiZ WORX was the *first* company to join USPro when it was incorporated, and that I could not afford a $1,000 per year membership these days, especially considering how little it bought me.

(His response was that one sale of my $5,000 WISL™ source library would pay my USPro membership dues dues for five years. My reply was that saving $300 per year on IPO meetings - assuming I could afford the $4,500 per year to attend *ALL* of the meetings - would still make me $700 per year poorer than I would be by *NOT* being a member of USPro.)

Then he asked me again for an accounting of the bad figures, and for hardcopy of the correct renderings. This is because SCRA and USPro cannot recreate the figures from the IGES files which I had previously supplied on CD-ROM, along with the software to create PostScript files from the IGES files.

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There are 163 figures in IGES 5.3 - 145 of them are created from IGES files, and the rest are LaTeX figures. If I could have my way, I would like to see nearly half of them reprinted, but these are only cosmetically flawed, e.g., they are not properly centered or the distortion is barely perceptible to anyone except the person who created them.

(With the exception of about four of the dozen or so added or changed since IGES 5.1, that would be me. :-)

Although I contributed many man-weeks of uncompensated effort to preparing IGES 5.2 (Computervision had reduced my participation from 50% to 25% after I stepped down as IGES Project Manager to become IGES Figure Editor), I was not recognized for my efforts under "Associated Staff".

I overlooked this insult and contributed over 20 man-weeks to the production of IGES 5.3, including travel and lodging at my own expense. My name on the cover as "IGES Figure Editor" was to be my reward, and compensation for being overlooked in IGES 5.2.

With the publication of IGES 5.3, my international reputation has been damaged, and my potential customers will get a Very Bad first impression of IGESDRAW™, which was used to render the sample IGES files for publication.

I have identified 23 figures which I, as IGES Figure Editor, insist must be replaced as soon as possible. USPro has confirmed that it is too late to change the IGES 5.3 CD-ROM, because they bought too many copies - SCRA only prints 50 copies of the paper version at a time, not 500 copies like NCGA did.

(The irony is that USPro paid more for the CD-ROM than the bids that WiZ WORX submitted to both NCGA and SCRA for an HTML version. :-)

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I have made Xerox copies of the 23 figures as they appear in the my personal copy of the 1995-12-01 draft of IGES 5.3 - they are correctly rendered in that draft, and even have the same page figure and page numbers as the printed version. I have mailed them the Chuck Stark at SCRA, but with the UPS brown-out, I do not know when they will arrive.

I still have some concerns about centering on some of the renderings from the draft, and the IGES Editor was supposed to correct them, but SCRA is just going to cut them out and paste them over the bad ones, anyway.

I don't expect SCRA to have corrected pages available in time for the Atlanta IPO meeting on the 19^th, so I will bring some copies of the 23 pages with me.

I'll send you the URL for the color renderings of the WYSIWYG example IGES files in a few days - the server I have in my living room (waterholes.com) is only a 28.8 connection, and at the moment I'm having trouble with my FTP connections to the wiz-worx.com server in Minneapolis (which has a T1 connection).