The original text was written in French. The translator's task was constrained by the fact that most of the French words used in the original text were originally coined by their authors in English publications, or have a commonly accepted translation into English. The problem was thus one of reverse engineering! Fortunately, there are now many textbooks in computational geometry which helped to resolve conflicts in terminology. Whenever possible, the translation conformed to the standard terminology or, for the more specialized vocabulary, to the terminology set up in the original papers.

For graphs, however, the use of the word edge overlapped with that of 1-faces for common geometric structures. Similarly, the word vertex is also used for polytopes in a different meaning than for graphs. The situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that sometimes graphs are introduced whose nodes are edges of a polygon. We have followed the French text in systematically using the words node and arc for the set underlying a graph and the symbolic links between the elements of this set. The terminology related to graphs is recalled in subsection 2.2.1.

We have departed from the French text for the word saillant (meaning salient) to follow the usage with convex vertices/edges, as opposed to reflex. Although a vertex or an edge is always convex in the original meaning of convexity, here it means (as most people would understand it) that the internal angle around the vertex or around the edge is smaller than π.