Technical Notes for FeynDiagram Version 2.5
These notes are somewhat technical. The contents of this file may
not be relevant to future releases of FeynDiagram.
Objects which can be drawn on paper, such as lines, vertices, entire
FeynDiagrams, and even pages all have a member function called hide().
Calling this function causes the object to be hidden, so it doesn't produce
any output on the page.
When computing the bounding box for the whole figure,
the bounding box for text is computed by guessing at about how big the
characters are (based on the Times-Roman font). Generally, it is
too large, so if you have text near the edges of the diagram, or you
have very long text strings, the bounding box of the diagram might not
be quite right. You may even get warnings that the diagram may not
fit on 8.5x11 paper even though it does. You can adjust the bounding
box by using the FeynDiagram::pad_bbox member function.
When doing \overline, \widetilde, \tildebar, \overrightarrow, or
special centering of text, FeynDiagram needs
some way of determining the size of the text. So, it has PostScript
compute the path for the text without actually drawing it, and then
finds the bounding box. If your text string is too long (more than about
25 characters), your printer may run out of memory, causing it to throw the
page away. Also, the bounding box the printer finds for rotated text
seems to be too big, so \overline doesn't work well if the text is
rotated (I don't understand this - is it just me?).
The "parameters" for various Feynman diagram parts are organized as
linked lists. So, it works it's way up the list until it sees that
one of the nodes actually has had its value set.
All pages are in one linked list. FeynDiagram's are linked lists attached
to pages. Lines, vertices, etc. go into a linked list on a FeynDiagram.
Shading for blobs goes in a linked list attached to the blob. Lots of links...
There are no copy constructors - maybe someday... (copy constructors are
nontrivial because of all of the linked lists - can't just copy bits)
OBSOLETE: (versions 1.21 and earlier)
If, for some reason, you want to override the PostScript prolog file
used by FeynDiagram (without recompiling), just set page::prologfile
to a string giving the name of the prolog file you want to use.
As of version 1.22, there are several prolog files that get
merged together as needed (instead of just one file) which should
make output somewhat smaller. So, page::prologfile is gone. It has been
replaced by page::prologdir which is the directory
name (including a trailing '/' or whatever is appropriate for your
computer) where the prolog files are.
Should each page of postscript be wrapped with a save/restore pair?
The dvips manual says that you shouldn't have save/restore's in
postscript files to be imported, but I haven't had any problems. To
eliminate the save/restore, just #define NOSAVERESTORE, and rebuild
the library.
line_spring actually has parameters fract1, fract2, fract3, and fract4.
Only fract1 is mentioned in the tutorial. There are probably
too many parameters - I may change some of the extras in a future release.
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