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Building Block Software The Boundary Offset Experts |
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What is Boundary Offset?
2D boundary offset is -- in mathematical terms -- the construction of a boundary at a given distance from a specified open or closed boundary. In the image above, the red boundary has been offset numerous times to produce the green offset boundaries.
2D boundary offset is all around us. Cabinet trim, picture frames, streets and highways, art designs, landscaping, bottle labels, and neon signs all use boundary offset. If you look around you, without a doubt, you will find other things which were made using a boundary offset calculation.
Constructing an offset boundary by hand is not that difficult. What is difficult is getting a computer to do it reliably. The little floating point round-offs that don't bother us humans cause computer programs to trip and fall face-first on their little flat-panel screens.
Why, then, even ask computers to calculate a boundary offset? (click here to read more)
Why a custom API for your application?
You might be wondering why you'd need a custom API to a library which already has a great API. The answer relates to making your application code clear.
The CAD/CAM Developer's Kits work with objects such as C2_CURVEs (curve geometry), T2_REGIONs (bounded areas with or without holes) and DML_LISTs (the Building Block Software flavor of linked lists). Although these objects are really good at doing what they are designed to do (for example, boundary offset, area booleans and toolpath generation), they are probably not the ideal objects for your application to be using. Chances are you already have objects like these defined, and all you want is to add operations (such as boundary offset, area booleans, and toolpath generation).
A custom API allows you to add these features while continuing to work with your application's native object types. The API is designed to take your applications objects as input and output, while "behind the scenes", the CAD/CAM Developer's Kit objects and functions are used to implement the operations you need for your application.