A DPS extension for XFree86 -- task list

Time-stamp: <24 February 2001>

Essential tasks

• Fix crashes with transparency and glyph subsampling.
• Destroy VMs when they are no longer used; currently, local VMs are never destroyed.
• Fix the global garbage collector (the local garbage collector works).
• Implement the inter-context synchronisation primitives (currently we only support ``fork'' and ``detach'').

Necessary tasks

• Implement the NeXT extensions to Display PostScript (partly done).
• Work on the memory usage:
  • make the glyph cache global;
  • choose smaller sizes for the stacks.
• Implement the ``%font%'' pseudo-device.
• Check whether DPS can work when drawing on drawables other than windows and pixmaps (notably DBE backbuffers).
• Continue working on improving the rendering code.
• Implement support for non-cubic colour cubes (e.g. under depth 16 TrueColor in XFree86).

Further tasks

• Improve the quality of the Type 1/Type 2 and the Type 42 (TrueType) renderers available. (This is a generic GhostScript improvement, but one that is particularly important for DPS.) (See the gsft page.)
• Improve the performance of bitmap images.
• Make GhostScript resource handling compatible with the Adobe implementation, especially fonts. Currently the resource installation procedures differ between the extension and client applications (use the resource location library psres).
• Implement cached forms?
• Improve the performance of userpaths. Implement cached userpaths?

Someday perhaps

• Implement device fonts, preferably in a manner compatible with Section 7.4 of the PLRM, 2nd ed.
• Implement calibrated colour spaces.

Juliusz Chroboczek, <jch@xfree86.org>.

Copyright © 2000-2001 by Juliusz Chroboczek

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