Name: rm29839 Date: 05/01/98


It would be nice to have a method in the
java.awt.geom.Area class to calc. the surface
area of the Area object. Pushing further,
it would be nice to have a method to calc.
the perimeter of an Area object.
(Review ID: 28196)
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Name: rmT116609 Date: 03/19/2003


A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
1) There should be a way to determine the area of any shape in square units. This can be very useful, for example, to ensure that two different symbols seem, to the user's eye, to have the same "importance". The brain will unconsciously compare the areas rather than the bounding (circumscribed) circles of the symbols. As an example, draw a triangle and a square in bounding circles of equal size and see how different they look in size. What does that mean? Etc. There are many other uses. Note that the area method should work even on shapes with crossings, but not necessarily on open shapes (unless it assumes that the final segment is linear).

2) Similarly, there should be a way to get the perimeter/length of a shape (maybe there would be a boolean to indicate, in the case of an open shape, whether it is assumed to be automatically closed with a final, linear segment). This is trivial to compute for a contour made of linear segments, but when quads and cubics are involved, it's a whole different story.

JUSTIFICATION :
Providing the measurement extensions is very important to help us create the user interfaces of the future, which will be more and more organic. Also, see more specific reasons above.
(Review ID: 182824)
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