walters@COMMUNITY-CHEST.MITRE.ORG (06/05/88)
I have several questions concerning NeWS. We are using the pNeWS release from Parallax on a Sun 3/160. Documentation: The documentation we received seems fairly sparse; it consists of a manual of Parallax extensions to NeWS, as well as a NeWS manual. I have also purchased two Adobe books on Postscript, the Reference manual and the cookbook. I have made some effort to find the answers to my questions in the manuals before attempting this posting. What other documentation is available (I also looked on the new-archive server documentation index)? Palettes: How does NeWS (specifically pNeWS) handle color? Can the default palette be changed? If so, how? Saving Postscript Canvas as Rasterfile: The demos that are provided show methods of loading rasterfiles and painting on a canvas. Is the reverse operation supported, i.e., are postscript/NeWS primitives provided that save a canvas as a rasterfile? Any suggestions, pointers, etc. would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. -- chris walters (walters@mitre.arpa) (703) 883-615 standard disclaimer...
glc@c3po.UUCP (Greg Cockroft) (06/10/88)
I have several questions concerning NeWS. We are using the pNeWS release from Parallax on a Sun 3/160. Palettes: How does NeWS (specifically pNeWS) handle color? Can the default palette be changed? If so, how? You can't change the colortables. You ask for a color with PostScript, and the particular NeWS implementation gives you the best that it can do. pNeWS uses the same color values as Sun NeWS, but in a different order. This is to make programming of graphics over video transparent to the programmer. Mapping tables are created for the 32 hardware available Graphics Over Video colors. These tables convert a full color RGB triple into a correct color index for the hardware. Different tables are used for converting Normal Graphics Canvases. If you really need to change the colormap on the 1280, you can use the "kitchen sink command" *parallax*. This is an added PostScript operator in pNeWS which allows you to send write/read directly to the board. You will need a manual on the 1280 to get the hex codes for changing the color table. Saving Postscript Canvas as Rasterfile: The demos that are provided show methods of loading rasterfiles and painting on a canvas. Is the reverse operation supported, i.e., are postscript/NeWS primitives provided that save a canvas as a rasterfile? Not until pNeWS 1.1 is released from Parallax. It was demoed in February, so I'm sure it will be along soon. But if you are really desperate you can use the "kitchen sink command" to do anything, including reading back bits from the board. -greg.