Re: Rendering of fixed-width fonts

[Adrian Robert]

On Mar 16, 2005, at 4:45 PM, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> Adrian Robert wrote:
> > On 2005-03-15 12:38:44 -0500 Adam Fedor <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > On Mar 15, 2005, at 7:33 AM, Adrian Robert wrote:
> > >
> > > > Is there any more efficient way to render with regular spacing than 
> > > > repeated calls to moveto and show?
> > > Try DPSxyshow and variants.
> > Ah.  Attached is a patch implementing these functions in back-art.  
> > ;-)
> > It modifies the existing DPSshow implementation to handle DPSxyshow,
> > DPSxshow, and DPSyshow.  Partial support is there for DPSwidthshow.
> > Right now I just patched ftfont-old.m since that's what I'm using
> > (freetype-2.1.2), and anyway this patch needs some feedback.
>
> Not sure if this patch is really needed. I remember moving the 
> implementation of these methods up to the GSC level. So removing the 
> current art implementation should give the full behaviour. Perhaps not 
> optimized for speed, but as we want to get rid of them anyway, it 
> should do.

OK, I see in GSGState.m the DPSxyshow family is implemented, yet plain 
DPSshow is left to the subclass.  Accordingly, in Art, DPSshow gets its 
own implementation.  It seems like there are merits both to 
consolidating backend code as much as possible in GSC and in allowing 
individual backends to handle things in a way more optimal for their 
nature.  But wherever this decision ends up for DPSshow for a 
particular backend, DPSxshow etc. should be in the same place, since 
their implementations are so similar (only difference is advancements 
between glyphs, which is a very small fraction of the code).

Or is the split relating to the desire to deprecate [xy|x|y|width]show? 
 I still can't find any reference on the web as to why, whether 
searching for DPS or just regular postscript.  These operators continue 
to be actively supported in recent Ghostscript, for instance.

Since they are useful at least for dealing sanely with monospaced fonts 
that are not monospaced, such as VeraSansMono-Roman, and the 
implementations are all there (assuming some form of this patch can be 
accepted), could we just undeprecate them?