marsh@linus.mitre.org (Ralph Marshall) (06/27/90)
I'm trying to write a general-purpose graph rendering tool that does a bunch of device-independent calculations and then has a small portion of device-specific code that emits the appropriate primitives for the display of choice. So far I'm working with the Garnet graphic system (from Carnegie-Mellon) and PostScript as the output devices to be tested. The problem I've encountered is that Garnet is relatively stupid and wants to have the origin in the upper left corner, which is obviously not what PostScript thinks. Now, I'm a semi-accomplished PostScript programmer, so I thought I'd have better luck trying to change PostScript's idea of up and down and leave the rest of the code the same. However, I gone through all of the obvious (to me) translation/scaling combinations and have succeeded generating in a number of interesting but not useful pages, including one that had the entire graph rendered perfectly, as long as you held it in front of a mirror. So, the question is: is there some way to do this that I'm missing, of is is just not possible? I have already changed the code I'm writing to generate landscape rather than portrait output, so I know that at least some of these changes will work properly. If anybody has any suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Ralph Marshall marsh@linus.mitre.org