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Yea... the first two interpreters I wrote in C used no third party libraries either. But I admit that I did not write a rasterizer for those as all they needed
by AndyCappDev 8mo ago
Yea... the first two interpreters I wrote in C used no third party libraries either. But I admit that I did not write a rasterizer for those as all they needed to do whas convert to other formats.
I did write rasterization code for a Win95 driver for HP that was very fast. I used Michael Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming as a starting point and extended/expanded on his algorithms.
This time around I wanted to focus on the PostScript language itself and cairo saved me a lot of time on the hind end. Though it does have some bugs... Like it's strokepath implementation for dashed lines. I worked around them though by writing my own strokepath and feed them to cario as raw paths.
The LaserWriter angle is certainly interesting though. Why specific to the LaserWriter may I ask?
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoI did consider using Cairo but figured a simple PDF driver would take care of most of the work. That would have been fine if not for the pathforall operator. I ended up doing all the stroke path implementation for dashed lines as well. I used to work for the UK distributor for QMS who were Adobe's second largest OEM for PostScript so I had a lot of exposure to early PostScript printers. Also I've always thought the LaserWriter was more significant to Apple than most people realise. I lost count of the number of companies I visited who had a bunch of Macs and a LaserWriter networked over AppleTalk.