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From: kent@godzilla.pa.dec.com (Christopher A. Kent)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Soliciting Display PostScript opinions
Message-ID: <2485@bacchus.dec.com>
Date: 23 Jan 90 18:55:02 GMT
References: <3483@csccat.UUCP>
Sender: news@decwrl.dec.com
Reply-To: kent@godzilla.pa.dec.com (Christopher A. Kent)
Organization: DEC Western Software Laboratory
Lines: 31

I'm the project leader for the integration of Display PostScript and X
under Ultrix, so I feel compelled to respond :-)

We're shipping product now -- DPS is a standard part of Ultrix as of
UWS2.2. You should be able to order it from DECdirect. The X servers
contain an extension that allows you to itnermix X and DPS imaging calls
on any X drawable (window or pixmap). This was described in a talk at
the 1989 X conference. 

Performance is ... well, it's really not bad at all. Of course, it
depends a lot on what processor you run it on. I have a DECstation 3100
on my desk, and DPS is truly a wonder to behold. It's not as fast as X,
by any means - if you can do something in X and DPS, you should do it in
X, because X tends to be closer to the hardware in our implementation.
But there are things that you can't do in X, and doing them in DPS isn't
painful. (I don't have a lot of numbers right now, but the last time I
measured just text speed, I got up to about 240 ppm. This may or may not
be an interesting number. I'll be doing more measurements soon.)

I've written a few programs using X and DPS, and they compliment each
other well. For example, DPS doesn't have XOR, but X does, so I can
image into a Pixmap with DPS and then use CopyArea to copy to the window
in XOR mode...

Adobe have announced that they will port Illustrator to our platform as
well. They also released the specs for the extension on the MIT R4 tape.

I'd be really interested in hearing about Phoenix's clone!

Chris Kent	Western Software Laboratory	Digital Equipment Corporation
kent@decwrl.dec.com	decwrl!kent			(415) 853-6639