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sliderule - calculator featuring a historic slide rule
sliderule
[-display display] [-bw pixels] [-stip] [-rv] [-geometry geometry]
Sliderule
features a historic slide rule calculator. You can multiply, divide, calculate
reciprocals, squares, square roots, and even trignometrical functions.
Anyway, you need to know how to do this. You can't add or subtract - but
if you know a sliderule, you knew this already. If you don't know, don't
worry: this man page won't make you learning it either.
- -display displayname
- This option specifies the X server to contact.
- -geometry geometry
- This option
specifies the size and placement of the top level window. By default,
the minimum size will be used. Doesn't work very well at all.
- -fg color
- This
option specifies the foreground color to use.
- -bg color
- This option specifies
the background color to use.
- -bw pixels
- This option specifies the border
width in pixels.
- -stip
- This option indicates that the background of the calculator
should be drawn using a stipple of the foreground and background colors.
On monochrome displays this makes for a nicer display.
- -rv
- This option indicates
that reverse video should be used.
The slide rule is operated with
the pointer. The only keyboard input that has any effect at all is the
key "q" to quit the program.
The slide rule consists mainly of three different
areas: the outside scales that are normally fixed with the left hand, and
the slider that is moved with the right hand. When moving the slider, a
black background will become visible.
Pressing button 1 inside the outer
part of the slide rule will move the hairline to the pointer position,
and update the digital display at the left-hand side (some comfort a real
slide-rule wasn't fond of). Moving the pointer around while keeping button
1 pressed, will drag the hairline.
Pressing button 2 or 3 in the outer part,
will double or half the width of the slide rule, respectively. This doesn't
work very well.
Pressing button 1 on the slider, or in the black area exposed
by the moved away slider, will move the slider so that the pointer position
will become the "1" on the slider. Moving the pointer then, while keeping
the button pressed, will drag the slider accordingly.
Pressing button 3
on the slider, or in the black area, will behave similarly, using the "10"
position of the slider.
Pressing button 2 on the slider allows you to grab
and drag the slider without moving it first.
For the curious, the various
scales are:
L mantissa of the decimal logarithm of D
A square of D
B square of C
CI reciprocal of C
C base scale
D base scale
DI reciprocal of D
S arc sine of D
T arc tangent of D
xcalc(1)
Resizing of either way doesn't work
pretty well. Best leave the geometry as it is.
Sliderule uses a prehistoric
way to obtain X resources, which is not documented in this man page.
Copyright
1988, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
See X(1)
for a full statement of rights and permissions.
John Bradley,
University of Pennsylvania
Mark Rosenstein, MIT Project Athena
Sliderule used to be the option
"-analog" of the old xcalc application, up to X11R3. This option has been
dropped later, when the stock X11 xcalc was rewritten as a Toolkit application.
This sliderule application is just the old "-analog" code only, with some
bugs and inaccuracies fixed, and the trigonometrical scales added. This
work was done by Joerg Wunsch.
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