Superficie (surface) is a small program that allows to visualize 3D surfaces, and to have certain interaction with them. It allows to rotate, to move away, to show illumination, etc. on the surface at issue.

It works like this: You generate the data in the program of your selection, like Mathematica, Yacas, Octave, some interpreter like scheme, or plain C. Then you start superficie and read the data (from a file or a pipe).

Right now, you can use yacas, mathematica or octave to generate de data. It shouldn't be very difficult to write the routines that do the same in any other language.

In order to compile it you need OpenGL (Mesa is OK) , Gnome and gtkglarea. Another very useful program is pstoedit. You can use it to convert the postscript generated by superficie to several editable formats (xfig, sketch, etc).

We are working in Linux, but thanks to autoconf you should not have problems in some other UNIX.

By the way, superficie is completely free (GPL). If you use it, the only thing that we requested is that you send your printings, commentaries, critics to us (constructive, please), and reports of errors.