wolfe@mprvaxa (12/03/83)
The recently adopted NAPLPS is in fact a graphic data transmission standard.
It is both a Canadian and American standard:
CSA T500-198x in Canada
or
ANSI BSR X3.110-198x in USA
Addresses :
Canadian Standards Association
Standard Divisions
178 Rexdale Boulevard
Rexdale, Ontario
Canada
M9W 1R3
X3 Secretariat/CBEMA
Suite 500
311 First Street
N. W. Washington D.C. 20001
My Opinion :
NAPLPS is an 8/7-bit graphics standard that implements the following
kinds of graphics
- Scalable ASCII text characters
- Scalable set of accents, diacritical marks, and special symbols
- Scalable MOSAIC (block graphics) text characters
- Scalable user definable characters
- resolution independent graphics shapes
- arcs - filled or outlined
- lines
- rectangles - filled or outlined
- polygons - filled or outlined
- points
- can define the patterns to be used for filled figures
- color!!
- any of the above can be in any color
- defines a "color map" whereby you select a subset of
colors to draw in out of the possible range
- max number of color map entries is 16777216 (24bits)
- max size of a color map entry is 16 bits per Red, Green, Blue
(48 bits total!!)
- macros
- allows you to predefine often used sequences
- 96 maximum
This standard is written assuming the data will be decoded
using a NAPLPS terminal but that is not strictly necessary.
It is possible to interpret this standard on a host and
drive any kind of graphics terminal to any reasonable resolution
(ie. upto 8388608 x 8388608 pixels (24 bits in x and in y) if you want!)
I am not aware of any UNIX implementation but I have seen a rather poor
subset implemented for the IBM PC (sorry I can't remenber name of company)
There might be others - place to look - BYTE magazine.
There was an extensive series of articles on this standard in this
years (1983) issues of BYTE magazine. Those articles are informative
but I think biased toward using the standard in a "videotex" application
which while the main reason behind the standard certainky shouldn't
be the only use for. It does define a way of transmitting graphics
imformation.jimla@tekig.UUCP (James G. Larsen) (12/03/83)
I am also interested in graphics standards for UNIX and MS/DOS. Jim Larsen
phb@hcr.UUCP (Paul Breslin) (12/05/83)
The only problem with using NAPLPS (did I get that right?) on a host for displaying/interpreting graphics is that the encoding is so convoluted in order to maintain device independence that you must sacrifice any hopes of getting reasonable speed in order to use it. Even the hardware/firmware interpreters are excruciatingly slow.