On Teichmüller spaces of surfaces with boundary (Q2382008)

In the paper under review, the author first characterizes hyperbolic metrics on a triangulated surface with boundary using a variational principle. He then applies this characterization to provide a new parametrization of the Teichmüller space of a hyperbolic surface with nonempty boundary so that the lengths of the boundary components are fixed. In this new parametrization, the Teichmüller space is an open convex polytope. When a sequence of hyperbolic metrics on a surface with boundary converges to a cusped metric, the coordinate introduced in the paper converges to the simplicial coordinate introduced by \textit{R. C. Penner} [Commun. Anal. Geom. 12, 793--820 (2004; Zbl 1072.32008)].