Those are both important questions, and the orientation in this section will make it easier for you to understand what’s going on when you go through the other chapters of this Online Tutorial.

Many of the lessons in these chapters involve systems with more than 12 surfaces or require saving lens files. If you do not yet have a license, you should still read the chapters – but you will not be able to run the examples yourself until you have received your SYNOPSYS key.

SYNOPSYS™ is one of the largest lens-design programs in the world, able to do hundreds of different tasks. One of our major goals has been to make all that power available even to a beginner. When you think about it, that’s not easy. How do you make so many things easy to find? What kind of interface is easiest to use?