jmol up/down metaphor confusing in the "View" right-click menu

[jason]

I noticed a potentially confusing thing in the totally awesome 3d graphics we now have with jmol.

sage: arrow3d((0,0,0),(1,1,1))

draws a very nice-looking 3d arrow in a bounding cube. When I right-click on the graphic and choose "View | front", it swings the viewpoint around so that I'm looking at the *top* of the original cube (so that I'm looking in the direction of the negative z-axis). I realize that the standard computer graphics viewpoint has the z-axis coming out of the monitor, so "front" is a valid label for this position in that sense, but it can be confusing to students who would have said that what is labeled as the "front" position is actually showing the top of graph. I imagine that it would be even more confusing to calc 3 students that the labeled "top" position is looking in the negative y-axis direction *with the positive z pointing down*.

The positions and actual viewing directions are thus:

"front" = looking down negative z-axis, positive y-axis pointing up "back" = looking down positive z-axis, positive y-axis pointing up

"left" = looking down positive x-axis, positive y-axis pointing up "right" = looking down negative x-axis, positive y-axis pointing up

"top" = looking down negative y-axis, positive z-axis pointing *down* "bottom" = looking down positive y-axis, positive z-axis pointing up

I think it would be less confusing if the View menu just listed viewing directions instead of assigning a "up" and "down" metaphor that can change depending on if you are doing math or doing computer science.

Jason

[jason]

See #2873 for how to fix this.

[mabshoff]

Fixed via #2873 in Sage 3.3.rc1.

Cheers,

Michael