  The twisted face-pairing construction of our earlier papers gives an
efficient way of generating, mechanically and with little effort, myriads of
relatively simple face-pairing descriptions of interesting closed 3-manifolds.
The corresponding description in terms of surgery, or Dehn-filling, reveals the
twist construction as a carefully organized surgery on a link.
  In this paper, we work out the relationship between the twisted face-pairing
description of closed 3-manifolds and the more common descriptions by surgery
and Heegaard diagrams. We show that all Heegaard diagrams have a natural
decomposition into subdiagrams called Heegaard cylinders, each of which has a
natural shape given by the ratio of two positive integers. We characterize the
Heegaard diagrams arising naturally from a twisted face-pairing description as
those whose Heegaard cylinders all have integral shape. This characterization
allows us to use the Kirby calculus and standard tools of Heegaard theory to
attack the problem of finding which closed, orientable 3-manifolds have a
twisted face-pairing description.
