Re: [Mesa3d-dev] Hardcopy Output Driver

[Brian P. <br...@va...>]

Allen Barnett wrote:
> 
> 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?

As I'm sure you know, there's a fundamental problem in that OpenGL
is raster-oriented while PostScript is vector-oriented.  

Marcelo mentioned gl2ps.  I haven't used it personally.

I think most people render high-resolution images with OpenGL then
print the raster images.  You might check out TR for generating
extra-large images: http://www.mesa3d.org/brianp/TR.html

Another approach, if you're just interested in line drawing, might
be to use OpenGL's feedback mode to capture the transformed coordinates
and emit PostScript line drawing commands.

-Brian