Speaker
Norman Graf
(SLAC)
Description
High energy physics is replete with multi-dimensional
information which is often poorly represented by the
two dimensions of presentation slides and print media.
Past efforts to disseminate such information to a wider
audience have failed for a number of reasons, including
a lack of standards which are easy to implement and have
broad support. Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF)
has in recent years become the de facto standard for
secure, dependable electronic information exchange. It
has done so by creating an open format, providing support
for multiple platforms and being reliable and extensible.
By providing support for the ECMA standard Universal 3D
(U3D) file format in its free Adobe Reader software,
Adobe has made it easy to distribute and interact with 3D
content. By providing support for scripting and animation,
temporal data can also be easily distributed to a wide
audience.
In this talk, we present examples of HEP applications which
take advantage of this functionality. We demonstrate how
3D detector elements can be documented, using either CAD
drawings or other sources such as GEANT visualizations as
input. We then show how higher dimensional data, such as
LEGO plots or time-dependent information, can be included
in PDF files.
We finally synthesize these elements by showing how a
complete event display, with full interactivity, can be
incorporated into a PDF file. This allows the end user
not only to customize the view and representation of
the data, but to access the underlying data itself.
Summary
We demonstrate a number of HEP applications which make use of Adobe's
support for the ECMA standard U3D file format in its Portable Document Format.
Author
Norman Graf
(SLAC)
