laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/15/85)
From: Neal Holtz <holtz%cascade.carleton.cdn%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Have had our LaserWriter out of the box a few hours. Brian Reid is right -- what a marvelous device; this is going to be a lot of fun. I was particularly surprised (pleasantly) with its ability to download raster images, then to apply arbitrary rotation and scaling to them. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that these would be done correctly (by treating each pixel in the image as a rectangle and scan converting it onto the page). There is obviously a lot of computation involved, but for moderate size images the timing is not bad at all, and the end results are worth it. Screen dumps from an Apollo come out nicely sized, crisp and readable at all rotations. Tomorrow (maybe today) I will be doing gray-scale images from the solids modeller we use (PADL2). Wheeee! Now a question: [I wonder if it will become necessary to set up a better mechanism for technical discussions specific to LaserWriter. This news group may not be entirely appropriate for these, but I will bluster ahead anyway]: In Postscript 23.0, as implemented on the Apple LaserWriter: readhexstring does not work as documented on page 89 of the Postscript language manual, and the Cookbook example 19 on page 67 does not work at all. The problem is that readhexstring does not always ignore newlines. In the following code it will return false and not read the 10-digit hexstring: /picstr 5 string def currentfile picstr readhexstring 1020304050 However, if you explicitly open a file to the standard input as in: /picstr 5 string def /infile (%stdin) (r) file def infile picstr readhexstring 1020 304050 Then everything seems to work properly, and the 5 bytes are read fine. Did I miss something, or is the documentation wrong, or is there a bug??
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/20/85)
From: Christopher A Kent <cak@PURDUE.ARPA> Maybe the world is ready for INFO-POSTSCRIPT? chris ----------