The Dr. Geo system

Dr. Geo is a Gnome free software created both for the interactive study of Euclidean geometry and for a mild introduction to Guile/Scheme programming.

Using Dr. Geo, you can draw many classical geometric contructions and explore their propperties either from the metric point of view (measuring angles and length) or from the transformation one (via plane trasformations). Each Dr. Geo figure comes with a logic tree which shows all steps towards its construction. The basic geometric constructions provided by the software can be extended by the user adding macro-constructions.

Dr. Geo also offers the possibility to learn Guile/Scheme programming at a very introductory level. With Guile scripts it is easy to interact with the geometric apparatus by implementing, for example, several formulas. In the latest releases, Dr. Geo has been improved on the programming side since it can evaluate entire files written in Scheme. In this way the user can take advantage from the typical structures of a high level language, like recursive ones for example, to create new kinds of figures.

In Dr. Geo there are many utilities available to the teacher: customization and locking of the user interface, integration in Dr. Geo of a simple text editor, possibility to export figures (LaTeX, Postscript and PNG), etc.

Currently, a project is in progress to have a TeXmacs plugin for Dr. Geo. In this way it will be possible to use TeXmacs as front-end interface for Dr. Geo and integrate directly all the geometric figures into scientific documents.