bryce@COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Bryce Nesbitt) (07/02/87)
Through ignorance, myopia or some other factor, here's something that I
have yet to see in a Desktop publishing program: True support for
character-only type printers. (Daisy wheel, golf ball, drum, band, etc...)
If *you* or someone you know is writting one of these beasts, consider
this:
Add support for non-bitmap printing devices. What's on the screen
would serve only as a positional indicator for later printout. Essentially
with a daisy wheel printer this would mean snapping to a character sized
grid. Pictures would be allowed in the file for reference and layout, but
would not be printed.
If you wanted to get fancy you could add support for user pauses to
change wheels (users could draw their own "wheel fonts"), and perhaps
proportional spacing.
Anyone want to pass this on to Gold Disk?
And, while I'm on my soapbox:
Most editors handle character insertion *terribly*. For each typed
character a separate read, insert and update screen is done. When the
editor slows down due to internal overhead, or when the system becomes
loaded, the user can get well ahead of the program.
The trick to make even a slow editor seem fast is to check the number
of pending keys and process them as a block. ONE insert and ONE screen
update. Even with a maximum queue of 20 characters the user will need to
type nearly TWENTY TIMES as fast to outrun the editor. The Workbench
Notepad has a bad case of needing this.
-----------------------------
|\ /| . Ack! (NAK, EOT, SOH)
{O o} .
( " ) bryce@cogsci.berkeley.EDU -or- ucbvax!cogsci!bryce
U I'd like the take the guy that implemented the BPTR on the 68000
and shift him left, twice.