The DPS project is obsolete

The DPS project is now obsolete.

At the time when I started this project, there was no decent rendering interface for X11 other than DPS.

Since then, there has been a large amount of work on a simple and clean X server extension, Xrender, which provides the basis for just such an interface.

Rendering libraries that are being built above Xrender include:

If your application uses DPS, please consider porting it to the above libraries.

The problem with DPS

The main problem with DPS is that it is a complex interface that requires, for efficient implementation, a fair amount of state and code to be resident in the server.

For reasons of both efficiency and functionality, it is often better to use DPS as a low-level rendering interface and put high-level libraries on the client side. Thus, the high-level features of DPS, while present in every implementation, are not actually used and are therefore unused baggage. This fact is explicitly acknowledged by recent implementations of DPS, which include features such as user paths that are not useful without an additional library layer above them.

The old pages

The old DPS pages contain information that you may find useful. The DPS extension's code is still available for download.

Back to my software page.


Juliusz Chroboczek - Source Forge