Re: [Dps-devel] Hello

[Juliusz C. <Jul...@en...>]

Hi David,

DC> A few weeks back I got in discussions with some folks on the Adobe
DC> developers newslist.  Among the things I asked were "Is DPS alive or
DC> dead?"  The answer was, as far as they were concerned, pretty much
DC> dead.

Yep, it looks like it.

DC> Have you (we?) documented a DisPlayScript language well enough that if
DC> Adobe quietly vanished we would know what our product does and could
DC> "sell" it on its own merits rather than as a clone.

Adobe have done a great job of documenting both PS and DPS.

DC> Clones of dead bodies are creepy crap, after all.

My primary goal is not to produce a clone of Adobe DPS.  My primary
goal is to produce a reliable and efficient high-level rendering
extension for X11.

There are good reasons to follow Adobe's model, though.  First, a
reliable PS engine, Ghostscript, is available.  Second, both DPS and
PS have been described in great detail, and are well-understood and
(as far as I know) not encumbered by patents; a sample implementation
is widely available.  Finally, the client libraries and some sample
clients are available under liberal licensing terms.

It is not impossible, though, that we might go further away from the
Adobe model in the future.  For example, the baroque semantics of GC
changes in Adobe DPS impose a slight performance penalty on the
extension; I might chose to deprecate this ``feature'' in the future.

In addition, we will, at some point, need to implement extensions to
DPS in order to provide anti-aliasing and better interaction with
Keith Packard's ``RENDER'' extension.

I hope this answers your question; if not, feel free to continue this
discussion.

                                        Juliusz