Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!xanth!kent
From: kent@xanth.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: A Modest Proposal (IFF QuickDraw)
Message-ID: <5279@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 19 May 88 06:35:07 GMT
References: <4033@gryphon.CTS.COM>
Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 54
Posted: Thu May 19 02:35:07 1988



Just to cut through all the BS Richard is shoveling (again);

1) Sure CGM is complex; for the very same reasons, so is Intuition.  Computer
   Graphics is a very, very big subject, and a format that promises to capture
   a whole drawing session and let you pick it up again later is bound to have
   a lot of structure.  Doing the job right takes time and money.  Doing it
   wrong first takes more and longer.

2) When we say Amiga and Workstation, we're not talking about an "under $5000"
   system either, according to the previous arguments here.

3) A workstation puts drawings on the customer's choice of output devices.
   How is Postscript at flatbed plotter driving?  An awful lot of the small
   shop drafting applications that might see an Amiga as a low cost way to
   get into computer aided drafting or extend an existing system are doing
   output on pen plotters.

4) A drawing session doesn't necessarily finish a drawing.  How is Postscript
   at storing the segment, visibility, symbol and other structure in a way
   that makes it easy to read back in and resume the session as if it had
   never been interrupted.

5) All ANSI standards are made by committee; it is in the rules.

I don't want to claim to be the final authority on this stuff.  I left
the standards racket in 1981, and have been only an observer and
occasional commentator since then.  It is certainly possible that the
whole universe of graphics has turned over once or twice since then.
I have seen (and helped procure) GKS drawing packages since then, and
I know that the standards activity continues hot and heavy to bind the
set {GKS,CGM,CGI} of standards to additional languages.

However, to the best of my knowledge, Postscript is _not_ a standard,
merely very popular, and this means there are going to be a lot of
portability and interoperability problems that have never been looked
at for Postscript.  It is a nice manufacturer's format, and GKS
drawing packages will (most of them) write to a "Postscript device,"
since Adobe was nice enough to make the definition of Postscript
public.

That makes it suitable for an output format, but not for a "store and
recover" metafile format; it was not designed to be one, and my bet
(without knowing the language) is that it is not one, simply because
it is a huge amount of work to design a metafile that is functional.
It happened that "metafile" was my subcommittee when I was part of ANSI
X3H3.

Anyway, you guys carry on; I've used about as much bandwidth sniping
about this as is likely to be productive, so I'll watch for a while,
and play unemployed graphics programmer a bit more. 

Kent, the man from xanth.