This website uses interactive CAD drawings of the Great Pyramid of Giza on all of its pages. These CAD drawings are taken from the classical surveying of the pyramid without any error correction for the architectural anomalies that are discovered later in this work. These CAD drawings can be downloaded from the appendix of this site. The CAD drawing display area is shown to the left of this text and the following summary explains the controls that are available when viewing the drawing.
If you move the cursor over the drawing, you can see that in the top of the object information panel (the area to the right of the drawing) the cursor position is displayed in the linear units currently selected for the drawing. The origin of the Cartesian axes to which the X and Y values relate is at the center of the base of the pyramid.
The default linear unit is the meter, and this can be changed using the top three buttons on the left side of the drawing which are labeled "Linear". The top button will change the cursor location display and any other linear unit output to meters, the second button will change to British inches (the unit of many of the pyramid surveys), and the third button will change to ancient Egyptian cubits (the unit of the pyramid builders).
The default angular unit is decimal degrees, which can be changed using the next three buttons on the left side of the screen which are labeled "Angular". The first of these button changes to decimal degree output, the second changes to degrees minutes and seconds (the unit of many of the pyramid surveys), and the third button changes angular output to radians.
By using a mouse wheel the drawing can be zoomed in and out. The default mode is to zoom to the cursor's position, and this can be changed using the next two buttons on the left of the screen labeled "Zoom". The first of these buttons changes to zoom-to-cursor and the second button changes to zoom-to-screen-center mode.
You can also select an area of the screen that you wish to zoom into by left clicking your mouse, dragging a box around that area, and then releasing the mouse button.
There are two drawing display modes which can be selected using the next set of buttons on the left of the screen labeled "Display". The top button switches the CAD drawing's lines on and off, and the second button switches the block drawing on and off. By default both of these buttons are set to the 'on' position, and when both buttons set to their 'off' position the CAD drawing will not be displayed. The final button in this section allows the background colour of the drawing area to be changed to any of the four available colours.
The last button on the left side of the screen is labeled "Reset" and will return the drawing to its fully zoomed out position, and does not reset any of the buttons selections.
To pan the screen display, hold down your right mouse button whilst moving the mouse in the direction required.
This panel, to the right of the drawing, is the area in which information about overlaid geometry is displayed. To demonstrate how
this works click here to draw the lines of the faces of the pyramid onto
the display area. You will now see two angled white lines on the north and south faces of the pyramid. If you place your mouse cursor
over the northern face line it will change to a blue line, indicating that it is available to be selected. If you then click on the northern
face line (then move your mouse away from it) you will see that two things have happened. First, the line is now selected and displayed in green,
and second the object information panel now contains a box labeled "Line E" and "Northern face".
This object information box contains 5 sub sections:
The small black triangle before each sub section can be clicked, which will open that particular section of information. Some of the information
within these sections will be obvious such as lengths and angles and the reason for the existence of other pieces of information will become relevant as you
progress through this work.
If you open the 'Angle' section you will see the angle of the face of the pyramid displayed. Use the buttons already explained on the left
side of the screen to change the units of angular measurement shown in this information box.
There is no limit to how many objects you can have selected simultaneously.
To de-select a line, either click the line itself or close its object information box by clicking the red 'close' style button in the top right of the box.
In the bottom left corner of the drawing area is a small purple tab labeled "Layers". Click on this tab and the layer manager will slide out from the
side of the screen. The layers manager is divided into two sections. The first section shows layers of overlaid geometry, and the second section
shows layers from the CAD drawing of the survey data of the pyramid.
The layers that are being displayed have ticked check-boxes to the left of their names, and by clicking in these check-boxes any selection of layers can
be displayed in the drawing area of the screen. Most of the layer names will display the obvious elements that their name suggests, such as the faces
of the pyramid, or the base etc. Those layers which are not immediately obvious by their name are introduced during the rest of this website.
There are two other panels on the screen, the "Secondary control panel" and "Data output panel 2" which are used to display more advanced information that is required during later stages of the work. These two panels will remain deliberately empty during the opening section of this website.