MCARTSHA@UREGINA1.BITNET (04/13/89)
Hi there. Here is a few little things I would like to find in printer
drivers in the future. If any of these are in the current versions,
please excuse my ignorance, and please flame me at my E-mail address.
anyways, I thought smoothing was pretty good. It was definately a good
idea. but it could be taken one step further. The printer drivers should
have an option to do two types of smoothing. One of which is the currently
available version, which i will refer to as linear smoothing. It takes two
points and puts a straight hi-res line between them instead of just making
jaggies. the other type that i am going to propose is what i will refer
to as curve smoothing. It takes a locus of points and plots the best
possible curve through them. it would be very nice to have this to smooth
pictures with lots of curves and it would be excellent for fonts. I just
hate getting a nice font on the screen and find that when it is expanded
on the printer that the "smooth" curves of the fonts are now straight lines.
I realize that it would put a considerable load on the CPU, but I think that
it could be worth it. The only problem I see with it is that if you actually
do have a corner, the it would smooth it out a bit; but that is why I am
suggesting a dual method.
The other thing i would love is for the printer files to leave room for
printer-resident fonts. that way, the word processors could allow you to
switch fonts and print with another font with ease. It beats having to fool
around with the buttons on the printer before printing the document. I could
see that laser printer owners would have an easier time. While we are on
the topic of printer resident fonts, most quality dot matrix printers now
allow for downloadable fonts. Could this be implemented in the printer drivers
too? Maybe just a file name containing the information to download to the
printer.
There are many different possibilities to pursue, and one could always
write a printer driver for him(her)self, but I am a firm believer in standards.
Afterall, I feel that this is one of the advantages of the Amiga that really
sets it out in front of IBM. We have standards that if everybody follows,
more things can be done with greater ease, and expandability is greatly
enhanced! But to make them standards, Commodore must know what we want and get
new and exciting ideas to make into standards, instead of falling behind in
technology. I encourage everyone to keep giving CBM all their USEFULL ideas
that could be made into standards.
With the thought of standards, is it feasable to have a committee
somewhere that software developers can show their products to to get an
approval? What I have in mind is basic programming standards so that the
USER of the software can see the seal of aproval and can guarentee that the
piece of software conforms to certain basic standards, so if the user in the
future expands his system with APPROVED equipment, he can guarentee that it
will work. One of my greatest fear is purchasing a $500 package and then a
hard drive, or accelerator, or maybe a '020 or '030, ... and finding out
that they are incompatable with each other and the software is now junk to
me. I would really apreciate it to know that the drive and software are
approved and that they will work with each other BEFORE I fork out the bucks.
I know that there could be some major problems with games. Maybe there could
be a few levels of standards. One approval for any expansion, one for
processor expansion, one for perepheral expansion, .... I would feel alot
safer. The other major milestone that I could see is that the developers
would not like to divulge their secrets to the commitee, and that the committe
would have a very hard time decifering code. But, it only would have to be
done once for each package. Could somone at CBM please respond to this
message on the net or to my E-mail address please.
thanks for your time.
Shanrichard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton) (04/13/89)
In article <8904130158.AA29326@jade.berkeley.edu> MCARTSHA@UREGINA1.BITNET writes: >Hi there. Here is a few little things I would like to find in printer >drivers in the future. If any of these are in the current versions, >please excuse my ignorance, and please flame me at my E-mail address. >anyways, I thought smoothing was pretty good. It was definately a good 1) Sony makes the best monitors. 2) PostScript makes the best printers. 3) Berkeley, apparantly, still has the best drugs. -- ``Parents who have children, have children who have children'' richard@gryphon.COM decwrl!gryphon!richard gryphon!richard@elroy.jpl.NASA.GOV
cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (04/14/89)
Consider the two characters A and L : In topaz 8 these characters
look like this (in big pixels)
** ****
**** **
**** **
** ** **
****** ** *
** ** ** **
** ** *******
Now on the "A" you _want_ to make the edges straight because that is
what they are simulating, however on the "L" the serifs on the top and
the bottom you want to be 90 degree joints because that is what they
are simulating. Suddenly, you realize that you need a little bit of information
about the character before you can really smooth it correctly. And this
if the whole point of course. When you enlarge a character you are trying
to create information out of nothing by guessing how a character should be
rendered at higher resolution. This is a *very* tough problem, and it is
why the Mac avoids it by using outline fonts rather than pixel fonts like
the Amiga.
However, don't be discouraged, I encourage you to play around with this
and try different things to do the smoothing. I'll even help write the
"lab" (eg a program that you can plug different algorithims into).
If you can come up with an effective algorithim, not only Commodore but
a whole bunch of other people would be interested as well I am sure.
--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.
"A most excellent barbarian ... Genghis Kahn!"