meltsner@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (04/24/87)
The principal problem with implementing GKS on top of X is that GKS was designed to work with displays and devices that couldn't change their attributes in mid-session. So, unless you want to break some part of GKS (like being able to draw lines of a specified real units length), you lose things like resizing windows. A more sophisticated implementation than the one from Visual Engineering would allow more sophisticated use of fonts (another area where the GKS standard seems to be lacking), resize, automatic redraw when the window gets clobbered (the VE version can do this on a programmer level, not on the device-dependent level), the ability to set sizes and positions of GKS windows, and the ability to open multiple windows as multiple GKS workstations (which seems to be a limitation of the current "quickie" VE implementation.) I have no idea if the VE version is publically available, but a test copy was made available to Project Athena for testing. I also have no idea whether the version of GKS on X I'm using will resemble their released version. Ken