--- name: folio description: Build a museum-style exhibition plate that explains a technical idea - an invented scientific instrument drawn as a live, engraved isometric figure in three views (SVG, WebGL light, and a 3D bench you can turn through 360 degrees) with internal parts that really rotate and interact, with numbered specimen pins, a catalogue key, a working model behind every number, and wall texts that walk through the formula term by term. Use for explanatory figures, interactive explainers, "how does X work" visuals, or technical illustrations for docs, courses, posts and landing pages, even when the request never mentions museums, plates or isometric drawing. --- # Folio A Folio plate explains an idea the way a natural history museum explains a specimen. There is one object on a mount, a numbered key beside it, and wall texts that tell you how to look at it. The object here is an instrument you invent, such as a bench, a balance, a loom or a still, whose working parts perform the idea. Readers can poke it, and every reading on it is computed. ## Three commitments 1. **Mechanism, not metaphor.** The instrument has to *perform* the idea, not stand beside it as an illustration. Before drawing, write one line: "When the reader does X, part Y moves, and that movement is Z in the idea." 2. **A single source of numbers.** A small pure model computes everything: needle angles, fluid levels, the readout, the key, the tables. The page only displays what the model returns, so no two places can disagree. 3. **A guided reading.** A good drawing still needs a guide. Each plate ships with a key, a term-by-term reading, the full working, and an honest account of what was simplified. ## Getting started - Three reference plates ship with the repo. **Plate I** (`examples/attention/`, attention as an assay bench) is the model for ideas made of discrete steps and a formula. **Plate II** (`examples/heart/`, the human heart as a double pump) is the model for anything that runs in time: a simulation integrated every frame, continuous flow, phases, and charts redrawn after each cycle. **Plate III** (`examples/grid/`, a power grid in miniature) is the model for electricity, magnetism and energy flows, and for a bench built from free-standing machines rather than bands: a turbine, a generator with a spinning rotor, transformers, pylons and a town. **Plate IV** (`examples/hashmap/`, a hash map as a sorting office) is the model for algorithms and data structures, where the idea is a sequence of discrete operations: each operation (insert, look up, resize) expands into a short list of timed acts (lift, carry, dip to compare, fly every card to a new place), played one after another, so the reader watches the algorithm take each step. Open the closest one first. - The fastest start is to copy a reference plate: `node scripts/new-plate.mjs ` makes `examples//` from Plate I. Then replace its model, scene and texts. Building from a working plate is quicker and safer than starting blank. - Shared exhibition styles live in `kit/folio-page.css`; a plate's `page.html` puts `/*CSS*/` inside its `