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Text File | 1994-06-05 | 25.5 KB | 588 lines

# # $Id: History,v 1.10 1994/06/05 17:29:31 heinz Exp $ # This is the history from the original 1.7 source up to now: 2.0 HWG internal - SAS/C 6.x compatibility - Added 24 bit capabilites. Note that any of the 24 plane ptrs can be set to NULL to achieve "partial" rendering of bitplanes. This way you can render e.g. a 300 dpi A4 24 bit image one plane at a time even on a small machine doing 24 passes. Afterwards you could combine the planes on HD to a full image. This seems to be easier than rendering clips with a depth of 24 bit. - sethalftonephase. - integrated Tom Rokicki's fixes. - handling of illegal type 3 encodings (well sort of). 2.1 HWG still not public - After a virtual memory restore the current font setup was totally messed up, which resulted in a invalidfont error in the best case. Worse cases were possible. I fixed this by removing a few global (Yuck!) font variables and integrating them into the graphics state. As a side effect calls to show are now faster. - For errstackoverflow and errdictstackoverflow the stacks were not cleared as the should be according to Adobe. The fix for the operandstack is complete. For the dictstack and execstack there might be still a problem. I currently have no idea how to solve multiple stack overflows and the Adobe manual doesn't really tell what should happen if the execution stack runs over its limit. - For the first time I put it into RCS. 22 HWG still not public - The new local/global VM scheme seems to be working now. The dictstack is like in a level 2 implementation now. The overhead needed triggers an increase of memory use of about 80% for all objects. I don't see a way to reduce this if I want to keep going to level 2. No idea yet on how to implement a nice garbage collection without adding _major_ overhead to object handling. At least a restore does a true memory free now. - New operators: setglobal, currentglobal, gcheck, scheck, glyphshow, <<, >>, undef, arct, setstrokeadjust, currentstrokeadjust, setbbox. - Neither setbbox nor the strokeadjust stuff is tested. - The strokeadjust stuff doesn't really do a decent strokeadjust currently. It is more of an experiment right now. - GlobalFontDirectory is now there, (Shared variant, too). - putinterval now deals with packed arrays. - execstack now correctly clears the attributes for all copied objects. - dictionaries conform to level 2 now and expand as needed. - undef is implemented. It doesn't reduce the dictionary size. It just invalidates the entry. (Note: This is not a typenull!) - null is no longer an operator but a constant. - The complete system name table according to the adobe reference manual appendix F is now implemented. - The object types are now numbered according to the red book, page 113, table 3.14. - Hashing in nametoken() should be a little faster now. - clippath will no longer return an empty clipping path. Instead it will return a zero area path at (0,0) device space. - <~ASCII85~> implemented, not tested. - Some speedups in scantoken. - Only PaintTypes 0 and 2 are accepted now, not tested. - CDevProc handling put in, not tested. - added 'a' and '+' modes to file opening, not tested. - defineuserobject/undefineuserobject/execuserobject, not tested. - filter mechanism in place, eexec runs on top of it now. dct, ccittfax, and lzw filters missing, proc and string input not tried. - Real BlueValues with a zero fractional part are now accepted to allow use of broken fonts. - /loadfont in init.ps discards garbage on the operand stack left by the font. - filenameforall implemented. I need this functionality for the resource ops. Limited testing. - setobjectformat, currentobjectformat implemented. Not tested. - error handling should be pretty much level 2 compliant now except for "binary" and stackoverflow handling inside the error handler itself. Not really tested. stackoverflow handling inside the error functions is a nasty one, as we don't have Level 2 compliant expanding stacks. This actually doesn't matter, as even a "true" level 2 interpreter could run out of memory in that situation. It seems to be an obscure and undefined case. I handle it my way. At least it should not crash. - character showing could be a little faster now. Hashing for it does not need multiplications anymore. It uses shifts and additions. - status should handle a string arg now. Not tested. - renamefile, deletefile, fileposition, setfileposition implemented. Not tested. 22.3 HWG still not public - callextfunc now no longer public. It is nasty stuff anyway. - Now the names @vmhwm, @prompts instead of vmhwm, prompts. - many internal speedups and simplifications. Don Knuth said that "premature optimization is the root of all evil.". This is of course true, but I mainly cleaned up quite some code to make it more readable to me and "reduced" definitely unneeded type sizes. The speedups came as a positive side effect, though they are probably not that noticeable with standard PostScript code. - imaging and filling now in separate source files. It was all too big IMHO. - For displays with less than 100 dpi on at least one axis, a default halftone frequency of 30 instead of 60 is chosen now. This gives at least some halftoning on screen as default which makes many pictures look much nicer. I am not sure that this conforms to the B&W book where it is said that 60 is returned as default, but it gives better results for B.J.User. So what the heck ... - When grestore behaves like a noop because there is nothing to restore, the halftone screens are no longer invalidated. - copy is now level 2 compliant for dictionaries. No attribute changes anymore for the destination. - There was some unlogical code in calclogicaldepth (pun intended) which IMHO could have failed under special circumstances. Should be safer now. - When closing an eexec file, the dictstack is popped only if there is sysdict on top of it. Anything else is silently ignored to avoid recursion caused by the error handler (which can cause files to be closed, too). - Implemented a ForceBold mechanism for type 1 fonts. If ForceBold is true and a stem would be rendered 1 pixel wide because its width is >= 1.3 and < 1.5 it will be thickened to two pixels. 1.3 seems to give visually acceptable results. 1.25 as limit for rounding up looks pretty unreadable already. 22.4 HWG still not public - StdXW and StemSnapX implemented. "Snapping" should work when the delta to the actual width is less than 1.0 _pixel_. - Implemented FamilyBlues and FamilyOtherBlues. - selectfont is now built in and behaves correctly. - Major rework of the font machinery to help adding the composite font extensions. Now most of the vars needed for rendering are cached at setfont time. I trade memory for speed. 22.5 HWG still not public - Moved the ForceBold limit up to 1.4. 1.3 just doesn't look too good. - Major rework of the font caching. The font cache size can now be changed (needed for setcacheparams) and with a tiny little change the efficiency of the font cache has gone up it seems. - Implemented setcacheparams, currentcacheparams. 22.6 HWG still not public - Setup internals for the implementation of User Parameters. This causes changes to VM handling, font handling, and the interpreter stack setup. All other values are currently noops. - currentuserparams, setuserparams, setvmthreshold implemented. Currently we don't have any garbage collection. So the value you set with setvmthreshold does nothing. 22.7 HWG still not public - Somewhere in 22.7 I went to SAS/C 6.51. 22.8 HWG still not public - xshow, yshow, xyshow implemented. Seem to work well. - missing flush in error message output added. - rectfill, rectclip, rectstroke. - half a ton of const keywords added to many functions. - setgstate, gstate, currentgstate. Not tested. - forall should no longer enumerate read protected keys. I am not exactly sure that this is correct behaviour, though. - kshow resets the current font after executing the proc if necessary. - findresource will behave as in a "small memory" situation as Adobe names it. That is, it will never fiddle with the VM mode even for type 3 fonts, unlike e.g. Display PostScript does according to Adobe. - moved definefont and undefinefont over to using resource primitives. I don't even know right now if it will compile. ;^) Uhm, as you see, undefinefont should be available now, too. - Implemented @RegisterDiskResource to tell HWGPOST what external resources are available. - findfont is using resources now, too. - init.ps is setting up the disk resources now! - eexec should behave like run now. It should automatically close the file it creates on EOF _and_ on any other termination! This should fix "{eexec} stopped" like constructs which used to leave systemdict on the dictionary stack. - findfont, definefont, and undefinefont are now defined in terms of resource operators as described in the R&W book. - ISOLatin1Encoding, StandardEncoding, and findencoding are now defined in terms of resource operators as described in the R&W book. - Split up font handling and show handling even more. Another source file postshow.c is now available. 22.9 HWG still not public - minor cosmetic reworks in some publically visible files 22.10 HWG first public beta release - currentcolortransfer returned garbage. Should be fixed now. - Internal preparations for setting up color spaces! - setcolor implemented. Not tested. - setoverprint. Note that this is a no op currently! - currentoverprint. - created postcolor.c with all the colorspace handling stuff. - Family[Other]Blues check still had a bug that showed with the "d" of the Times-Italic I have here. Should be fixed now. - I commented out the halftonephase ops for now. This will need much work _after_ patterns are done. Any halftonephase != 0 will probably slow done rendering a lot then. - sethalftone, currenthalftone, general halftone dictionary support. Not tested at all. - This just came to mind. Did I mention that the scanner no longer uses the isspace() macro, but truly checks according to the R&W book specs for white space? This has been in there for quite some time. - Added provision for true CMYK rendering into the bitplanes instead of RGBW on the fly. This has actually been done earlier already, but now it is enabled. Not tested. - For the pattern color space, I need a masking feature. So I enhanced the device structure to provide for a mask. - Big problems with the image ops and handling of the Decode array fixed. It wasn't decoded correctly anyway and it wasn't used at all for gray scale devices. - A missing flush in effect mixed error output and output by e.g. =, ==, pstack in an inappropriate way. 22.11 HWG internal - /version should be a string now. Sorry for the inconvenience. - curveto with the same start and end point now works as intended. - pathforall now copies the path into an internal buffer before enumerating it. This way changes to the current path while pathforall is active no longer hurt the result. - Commented out sethalftone/currenthalftone and setcolor for now. They are not fully functional yet, and their presence might confuse valid PostScript files. - Serious bug in handling of parameters for the image operators resulted in errors for 8 bits per sample. Found this by accident only. :-( 22.12 HWG release for NOVA. - True halftone phase support is back. It should be general enough to be a base for patterns. Rendering of halftone screens is slower now than before. I might add a special optimized halftone function for standard filling though that runs fast for any x shift of 0 or by a multiple of 8 pixels. - Fixed a bug that could possibly mess up halftoning for very small vertical rendering. Never noticed this though. - Added deviceinfo to make /processcolors in statusdict easier. processcolors has been added, too (In init.ps!). Why I did this now? I just got news about /processcolors and before I forget about it, I add it. - Bookman-Light showed me a possible problem with eexec decoding. Though I think that Bookman-Light actually violates type 1 font specs, I added special code to the file handling to work around the problem for IBM font style binary encoded eexec portions. The above is a euphemism for "hack added to make ugly stuff work". Note: Anyone complaining about a font not working is required to provide me with a legal copy of the font for my own use from now on. Argh! Sidenote: Bookman-Light 001.003 is buggy according to Adobe. In 001.004, the problem is supposedly fixed. - Work on Separation/Indexed colorspaces to get all the interfaces for patterns set up. Tricky and not yet visible to the user. Probably not for a while. - To get best performance and memory use for any halftoning or patterns, you should have a width of the cell that is a multiple of eight device pixels. Any halftone phase other than a multiple of eight will slow down cell rendering. Any width other than a multiple of eight will (sometimes considerably) increase memory use. This is especially important for users of halftone dictionaries. The cell will be replicated in x direction until a byte aligned width is achieved. So e.g. for a 9 pixel wide cell, the actual internal width and memory requirement will be 9 * 8 == 72 pixel per line, which can be evenly divied by 8. If I did not do it like that, rendering would not take long, but forever. Actually it is not a new invention. The default halftone screens always did it like that. I used this for halftone screens specified via dictionaries only, and I have reason to assume that I'll need it for patterns. - eexec reworked again. It now uses a destructor to pop the system dictionary. The file handling is back to normal. No strange stack handling within closing of files anymore. I feel that this is good news. - Interesting enough, the eexec rework led me to a problem with the implementation of resource ops while debugging. Tricky manual stack manipulation after a resource op caused an error could cause a crash. Should be robust now. - setdevparams, currentdevparams. They are dummies that don't do very much. setdevparams will always give an error and currentdevparams returns an empty dictionary. - Reworked halftone validating mechanism in my quest for patterns. I made it look more "black box" for the callers which should help me a lot in the future. As a side effect a few unnecessary invalidations of halftone screens could be removed. - Color handling behaves better now, too. Setting a colorspace and setting the colors is much cleaner internally now and colors will be only set once not twice for every colorspace/color change. Oh well. Not exactly true. sethsbcolor will first set the colorspace and with that the initial color, and then the requested hsb color will be set. That is what you get for using strange stuff. - I'll have to design a general bitmap caching scheme within the VM handling. This will cover hopefully characters, patterns, and forms. Maybe I can even do something about user paths then, but I doubt it. While thinking about this and looking at the current font cache handling, I could fix a possible hole in font type checking and improve VM efficiency with save/restore combinations. Strange how things hang together sometimes. - For the Pattern color space, the font cache will be ignored. A rendering function would be needed that I am not willing to design to support rendering of the font cache in any reasonable way. So with patterns all characters will be rendered the slow way. - The interrupt signals will be checked now in '=', '==', and in 'pstack'. While doing this, I added correct defines for the signals to postlib.h. I added defines for the garbage collection that does not yet exist, too. - Changed style of error display to something supposedly much more Adobe like. - Changed rounding factors for setstrokeadjust to 0.25, i.e. I use the 1/4 method suggested in "PostScript by Example". Should give slightly better results. Why didn't I think of that in the first place? - Interesting enough there was a bug in VM save/restore handling. restore would not correctly restore things in all circumstances because marking of allocations was off by one. - Handling and closing of the currentfile was not exactly "ok". It should work better now, and currentfile should never return "wrong" file handles. Uhm well, if no file exists, currentfile will return %stdin to return something. There is not really a concept of an invalid file object. - There should no longer be any "hanging" file open calls when an error occurs. When a file is closed, it is closed now. No fake close handling anymore to keep the interpreter happy. I originally missed a paragraph in the R&W book saying how it works and messed it up. Now it is done right (I hope). - Time for a freeze. 22.13 HWG internal - Threshold halftoning was ... uhm ... totally broken. It should work now. This paragraph doesn't tell how much time I spent on it. As a positive side effect of the rework, the halftone cache is now smarter. Going from black to white shold be as fast now as going from white to black when asking for halftones. - sethalftone is now available. - Still a "typo" in the new error message format corrected. - There could still be "hanging" file open calls when the execution stack was popped, e.g. on error or quit. Now any files encountered while popping the execution stack will be closed. This should help a lot. - Note: kshow does not create a loop context currently! I'll fix this when I am into composite fonts. I'll need to invest some thought into this. Colorspaces are still first on my list. - BTW, if you guys out there want CIE color spaces, buy a decent book on the subject, and send it to me. The R&W book isn't all that clear, and afterall it would be nice if I didn't have to spend all my money on this. :-) If nothing like this happens, CIE color spaces won't come soon. - In systemdict you will now find /=string with a length of 128. - Added the destructor concept to vm restore handling to make cache flushing independent of vm handling. - name table handling is now more black box, too. I need all this black box handling to implement the new general caching scheme. A small change to the hashing in name token seems to have helped lookup performance. - Added @calluserhook. Not tested yet. mark <args> <hookadr> <msgadr> @calluserhook ==> mark <resargs> <resint> ints, reals, bools, or strings may be used as args with a maximum number of 8 arguments. The values are put into an array of longs that is passed as object address to the hook. For strings two slots in the array are used for address and length. On return the values of ints, bools, and reals will be copied back into the internal PS objects. The called function runs on the context of post.library and might need to set up A4 from e.g. hook->h_Data to make use of its local near data segment. No assumptions may be made about post.library's context! It is private stuff! All this should help people needing to interface to external code a lot. - The new general caching scheme is in place now. While it has more overhead than the old font cache, there does not seem to be a performance hit as hashing and caching is a little smarter. - For blue values any reals are now accepted and converted to integers. - Some cleanup to the font and show handling for the new caching scheme. - exit always had a bug. It would look below the lower end of the exec stack. One object too much. Ouch. - kshow now has a loop context that can be exited via exit. I don't have composite fonts yet, sorry. - While testing pattern generation, I found that gstate object handling was in fact totally broken. The paths were not saved correctly. This works now. Otherwise patterns would not work. - Patterns seem to work now. Please note that patterns are sort of slow to render because there is a lot of work to do for this including floating point calculations when a cached pattern is imaged onto the page. Patterns are also memory hungry. If you know the bounding box in device space (i.e. in pixels of the bitplane!), you can estimate how much memory patterns eat. They use bitplanes in the size of the bounding box. One mask bitplane is always needed and for colored patterns you'll need one pattern bitplane per device bitplane. Currently there is no setsystemparams call and the maximum amount of bytes for the pattern cache is ~60K. As we don't have a garbage collection yet, allocated memory for the pattern cache will stay allocated until it is either reused or invalidated by a VM restore. - Hopefully not too many bugs lurk inside pattern handling. BELIEVE ME, PATTERNS ARE TRICKY TO HANDLE! - As I said above, drawing characters with patterns does not use the font cache and probably never will. It is slower of course but it works the same and doesn't add tons of special handling to rendering. - Corrected a sign bug that messed up 360 degree arcs with arcn. This one has been in there since at least 1.7. I found this while testing patterns. 22.14 HWG the pattern freeze. - The band rendering operators are now named "@currentband" and "@setband". To keep compatibility to old post.library usage, I added a kludge to init.ps to define the old names in terms of the new names. Using the old names is strongly discouraged, though! - Oh well, I forgot to mention that the masking feature contained in the struct PSextdevice works and may be used. If it wouldn't be working, patterns would not work at all. - An interesting comment on the side is that the interpreter source is still fairly portable even with those many changes. So if I was ever to find a computer with a better OS than the Amiga, I could take the interpreter with me. Don't fear anything, though. There isn't any better OS around for me as far as I can see. - Cleaned up names for extended PSsignalint() flags. - Added missing PSerrstr prototype and pattern cache default sizes. 22.15 HWG - Just found a bug when testing the release version. Font caching would not work correctly. - I totally forgot to mention that XUID's should work for fonts and patterns. 22.16 HWG Pattern Release *** EOT ***