Re: Type1 fonts & status of various backends

[Adam Fedor]

Wim Oudshoorn wrote:
> 
> B. XGPS is here to stay, but does not aim to have complete DPS
>         support.  In this case I would like to have an idea
>         which features it will and which features it won't
>         support.
> 

This is probably most likely, far several reasons:

1. DPS implementations (DGS, XFree DPS, ...) are not complete.
2. DPS is slow (even Adobe's DPS).
3. People will always want a fast, light solution.

and

> - Porting to other platforms (e.g. Win32) is much easier for the
>         limited version.
> 

Note that the only difference between the xgps and xdps backends is
graphics. All the window and event handling is the same. Whatever was
easy to implement with Xlib calls was put into xgps (in particular,
scalable and rotatable text is not implemented). I don't put a lot (well
almost no) time into improving it, but anyone can feel free to do so.

Any major improvements (for instance, using libart) might (or might not)
call for another backend...

> 
> > BTW some weeks ago Ralph Levine took over the maintenance of Ghostscript
> > and one of the things he put on his working list was display postscript.
> 
> Now I am confused. Is this display postscript == DGS?
> 

Maybe the proper way to say it is a Display Postscript implementation
based on GS, but that's not exactly what Ralph was proposing - it was
more like having the ability to integrate ghostscript into (GNOME)
graphics via a drawing buffer (which would almost completely eliminate X
drawing calls and make it fairly fast). It's a pretty good idea anyway.


> Well CVS is a problem.  I do not have Internet access at home for
> some time.  (Depends on how fast I can buy a house move into it)
> And the company I work for has a firewall which blocks CVS access.
> 

There are snapshots at ftp://www.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/snap