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Re: Slimming down the drawing API
From: |
Richard Frith-Macdonald |
Subject: |
Re: Slimming down the drawing API |
Date: |
Mon, 25 Feb 2002 04:57:33 +0000 |
On Monday, February 25, 2002, at 04:15 AM, Adam Fedor wrote:
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?).
I hope I don't seem to be arguing against Fred ... I don't really intend
to.
I'm trying to express caution and a desire to maintain/improve backend
consistency
while minimising support work required.
Where I say we should stick to the PostScript API, what I mean is that
we should do
it as much as is reasonably possible. ie that we shouldn't introduce
new APIs for
the convenience of a single backend.
Short of making a wholesale change to another API (which I don't
necessarily view as
a bad thing, just something that I don't know of any real candidate
for), I think
we should examine each case individually with some care.
It's possible that we may soon find ourselves with a new de-facto API
anyway -
Fred says that we don't use the PostScript stack in xgps...
to me that seems to indicate that we are doing five fairly simple types
of operation
with little in the way of complex interaction -
Window management operations
Complex curves etc using NSBezierPath
Images using a few operations
Test using NSStringDrawing
Simple lines and fills of areas
In which case, there really doesn't seem much postscript left anyway.