Re: Postscript & Win32 API/True Type

[Darrin Smart]

A GDI driver is indeed possible. New backends for lout are not terribly
difficult to write. I did 90% of one last year for a PDL we developed
here at CISRA. Blake, I can send you the code if you are interested.

The main problem is that a lot of louts functionality is actually
implemented in Postscript (remember ps is a full programming language).
So unless your backend has the same power its very hard to get some
features going (the diag package, for example). This is why you can't
use diag with the PDF backend.

The other headache would be that lout is designed to write an output
file rather than draw to a display. Although you could probably work
around this. Maybe it would be possible to write an WMF/EMF file
instead.

And yes, True Type is generally more powerful than Type 1, but of course
there is no point using TT in a PS backend!

By the way, people interested in TT for unix or whatever should also
check out www.freetype.com.

Having said all that, I still use lout with Ghostview and find it about
as easy as anything else.

 - Darrin