RE: Slimming down the drawing API

[Adam Fedor]

Well noone seems to be on Fred's side, so I guess I'll have to help him 
out :-)

I'd also agree that we should provide a higher level interface than PS, 
even for drawing. Remember that the PS function that we would need to 
privde aren't just the ones 'we' use but any power user would want to 
use, and some drawing functions require pretty significant PS drawing 
manipulations, most of which we could never hope to emulate fully, but 
at least we could provide a high-level equivalent that would avoid the 
complex PS code. Quartz, for instance, is a fairly high level drawing 
interface (perhaps we could model after that?).

It would also be almost trivial to write a fully complient PS backend by 
linking in the ghostscript library (as I talked about at FOSDEM) and 
expose the full power of PS to the developer without changing our 
backend interface (not that I advocate doing this, it's just that I know 
that it is possible to do, so I don't feel compelled to emulate PS fully 
in xgps (which was only a quick hack until DPS got working, but it got 
out of hand...))


--
Adam Fedor, Digital Optics Corp.      | I'm glad I hate spinach, because
http://www.doc.com                    | if I didn't, I'd eat it, and you
                                      | know how I hate the stuff.