another yucky geometry question

[Jim Hurley]

>
>Message: 1
>Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2005 22:22:17 -0700
>From: TJ Frame <tjframe at gmail.com>
>Subject: another yucky geometry question
>To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
>Message-ID: <7348a9e8050925222216898aaa at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>Hi everyone,
>  Does anyone know a good place to look for ( or know of any example stacks)
>that might shed light on how to plot an ellipse inscribed within a 4 sided
>polygon like in the examples I created here:
>http://www.tjframe.com/EllipseExample.htm
>  I can handle the polygon, as well as finding the midpoints of the lines,
>the center of the polygon etc. ..just not sure about fitting that ellipse
>inside it. Curse my math - resistant brain!
>  Any pointers would be, as usual, greatly appreciated :)
>   - TJ


TJ,

Tough problem. It would be difficult even to make it a well-defined 
problem, i.e. a problem with a unique solution.

Given an ellipse which fits inside a given quadrilateral, one would 
always rotate the ellipse a bit and fiddle with it a bit to find 
another. And only in a special case would the ellipse be tangent to 
the quadrilateral at the midpoints of the four sides.

Do you want to do this dynamically in your stack or just illustrate 
some examples? Would it help to fit bezier curves inside the 
quadrilaterals?

Jim