But I stayed for the content. Interesting! And what a great presentation! I have so many questions. What happened to this in the intervening decade? Is the idea incorporated into any other plotting packages? Did you purchase this font to use in your talks?
> Oh God, 10 years ago ...
I know that feeling.
The package vfplot [1] is still available and still under development, it's rather hard to use in that there are lots of parameters to adjust to get decent looking output. There's also an issue in that the "dimension climbing" approach means putting an ellipse at each boundary corner and then as many as you can fit on the line-segment between them, there are lots of ways that this can fail for complex boundaries (coastlines, for example). I think I've fixed this using the fact that "a line segment is a degenerate ellipse", so one can actually calculate a "distance" between a line-segment and an ellipse in almost the same way as one calculates the distance between ellipses. The code for this is in a branch on GitLab [2], but there is still quite a bit of work to do for the 2.0 release (later this year?).
[1] http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/en/code/vfplot/
http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/pdf/vfplot-GUM11.pd...
Oh God, 10 years ago ...