[Mesa3d-dev] Hardcopy Output Driver

[Allen B. <ba...@lo...>]

Hi,

Has anybody ever built a hardcopy output driver for Mesa which (more or
less) retained the detailed geometry of the original primitives (as
opposed to just taking a screen snapshot)? For example, older versions
of the SGI Showcase program generated postscript commands which
corresponded directly to the transformed and lighted points, lines and
polygons in a scene; it even seemed to take care of depth sorting so
that 3D elements where drawn correctly. (It didn't support texture
mapping, though, which is probably why later versions of Showcase
generated raster images instead.)

I'd like to build something which works with StarOffice (or OpenOffice).
Currently, the only color vector drawing format which it can import is a
Windows Metafile (which is basically a 2D drawing format). You could
probably do something similar to the Showcase PostScript driver if you
weren't too picky about smooth shading and texture mapping.

Would this be a reasonable approach? Or would it be better to just
render in OSMesa at a high resolution and live with the raster image?

Thanks,
Allen