roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (07/21/88)
I've just started playing around with NeWS and have already run
into some things that don't seem to work right. The current problem has to
do with rotated text. If I run the following program through psh:
%!
/Times-Roman findfont 72 scalefont setfont
/inch {72 mul} def
4 inch 4 inch translate
0 inch 0 inch moveto (Hello!) show 45 rotate
0 inch 0 inch moveto (Hello!) show 45 rotate
0 inch 0 inch moveto (Hello!) show 45 rotate
0 inch 0 inch moveto (Hello!) show 45 rotate
0 inch 0 inch moveto (Hello!) show 45 rotate
0 inch 0 inch moveto (Hello!) show 45 rotate
showpage
I get the word "Hello!" printed at various angles, just as I would expect,
but only if the window is fairly large. If I use a window smaller than
about 1/3 the hight of the screen, some of the Hello!'s come out looking
horrible, with missing letters, extra blotches and strange places, etc.
Much worse than you would expect simply because of screen resolution
problems. It seems that the font generation machinery can't deal with
rotated coordinate systems very well. Am I doing something wrong, or is
this a fundemental problem in the system?
Another problem has to do with what looks like bugs in the terminal
emulators. Right now I'm using emacs in a h19 (console) window. Various
strange things keep happening. Sometimes (repeatably when I do "!ps" on
the last line of the screen) it draws a single-pixel-wide horizontal line
about a third of the way across the screen. When I suspend or quit emacs,
I'm left with a ">" on the last line of the screen. Ocassionaly I get
random pieces of text stuck in odd places on the screen, which C-L from
emacs won't clear (but redisplay in the frame menu will). Could these just
be termcap problems or is there really something wrong?
Lastly, my initial impression is that NeWS is s-l-o-w compared to
suntools. It seems to take forever for windows to open and resizing or
moving existing windows feels real sluggish compared to suntools windows.
--
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"