steve@hanauma.Stanford.EDU (Steve Cole) (02/07/91)
Recently I posted asking for help displaying NeWS graphics in an X11 program. My problem at the time was figuring out how to tell the server which X11 window to plot NeWS graphics in. I got several very helpful replies, and I want to thank those who responded (some of my e-mail thank you messages bounced). I'll summarize results by e-mail if anyone is interested. Now I have a new problem, and am hoping that someone with relevant experience can point me in the direction of a solution. For those of you familiar with the Xtex previewer for TeX documents, my project is supporting NeWS graphics in Xtex. This will allow you to preview documents with included PostScript figures. Previously Xtex supported Display PostScript, but not NeWS. I've written all the code and it's working fine - on 1 of my 3 machines. I preview the document, figures come up in the right place and sized properly and all that. But on 2 machines some figures will have problems. The coordinates of the included PostScript figure will get mangled somehow, and the figure will plot all wrong, all over the screen. These figures work fine on the first machine, and I can preview them with pageview on all 3 machines. Two of my machines are dataless clients of the third, so there should be no question of software differences. The one where it works has a smaller screen (but I doubt this means anything) and there are differences in memory and swap space but the machine where it works has the smallest amount of memory of the 3. I've found that scaling the PostScript figures down in size makes them plot ok on all machines. This scaling does no harm, since Xtex scales figures to fit in the right place on the screen anyway. It's not that the scaling makes the PostScript files any shorter, it just means that the coordinate values in the file are smaller. Scaling is especially helpful with files containing 300 dpi rasters, which I have to scale down quite a bit in order to get them to work on certain machines. So, does anyone have any experience that might shed some light on this? Does this sound like a problem with running out of memory? Should scaling the PostScript file help the X11/NeWS server avoid memory problems, even though scaling does not make the file any shorter? Or is it something other than memory? Sorry for such a long post, but the problem is involved and I wanted to give a thorough description. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. The NeWS support should show up soon in a new version of Xtex, but I'll be a lot happier if people can just supply any PostScript figure, and not have to worry about scaling it down first so it will preview ok. Thanks again for your time and interest. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Cole (steve@hanauma.stanford.edu, apple!hanauma!steve) Department of Geophysics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305