Re: [Mesa3d-users] postscript rendering possible?

[Stephen J B. <sj...@li...>]

On Fri, 17 May 2002, Rouben Rostamian wrote:

> Hello Mesa users!
>
> Is there a utility for capturing Mesa-generated graphics
> as vector postscript output?

I don't know about a specifically Mesa solution - but there
was at one time a package on www.opengl.org that did a
partial job of generating Postscript from raw OpenGL
calls.  It's hard to do a good job though - hidden surface
elimination and texturing (for example) are particularly
hard to render in Postscript.

Check out:

http://www.opengl.org/developers/code/mjktips/Feedback.html?postscript#first_hit

...and...

http://www.easysw.com/~mike/opengl/index.html

> I can save the graphics in pixel-oriented formats, such
> as png or tiff.  But such pixel graphics don't do well
> under scaling.

You might want to consider rendering your image at insanely
high resolution (perhaps tiling the image so that you can
render it in (say) 1k x 1k chunks) - so that you can
send the raster to your printer (or whatever) at a
sufficiently high resolution.

It's relatively easy to scale a raster image *down* in
size - so if you start of with very high resolution,
you should be OK.

> I believe that implementing vector postscript output
> amounts to re-writing a good chunk of Mesa in Postscript,
> therefore it may not be a simple task.  I wonder is this
> has been done or is being worked on.

Yes it has (see the GLP link above) - but the results
are disappointing simply because you end up needing
pixel-like rendering primitives in order to get
perspective-correct texture, alpha blending and
hidden surfaces (to name just a few) in Postscript.

----
Steve Baker                      (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
L3Com/Link Simulation & Training (817)619-2466 (Fax)
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