Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!hplabs!sdcrdcf!trwrb!cadovax!gryphon!richard From: richard@gryphon.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: Re: A Modest Proposal (IFF QuickDraw) Summary: Now, now K*nt, lets be polite. Message-ID: <4121@gryphon.CTS.COM> Date: 20 May 88 18:25:08 GMT References: <4033@gryphon.CTS.COM> <5279@xanth.cs.odu.edu> Reply-To: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) Followup-To: alt.birthright Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, CA Lines: 118 Posted: Fri May 20 14:25:08 1988 In article <5279@xanth.cs.odu.edu> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: > >Just to cut through all the BS Richard is shoveling (again); Coming from an expert on the subject. >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. Ok, K*nt, knock yourself out. Go ahead and wait for CGI to be finalized, and then go code the thing. Let us all know when you finish. But, given the record of "graphics standards" as soon as they are done, they will go and make one so supercede it. Rememebr VDI ? >2) When we say Amiga and Workstation, we're not talking about an "under $5000" > system either, according to the previous arguments here. No we're not. We're talking about under $2000 in the vast majority of cases. The Over $5000 people can probably afford to pay you to write CGI for 10 years, or go buy it from GSS for $1500. >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. This is not a problem. >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. This is not a problem. >5) All ANSI standards are made by committee; it is in the rules. This is a problem. >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. Sure they are. The only problem is applications writers look at the spec for GKS or CGI and go: "Oh god, forget it, I'll just write to the hardware". And as you said, K*nt, you don't know what you are talking about. Why dont you go and get a postscript book, read it, understand the difference between the imaging model and the programming model and then come back and attempt sentient thought. >However, to the best of my knowledge, Postscript is _not_ a standard, Fortunately, the best of you knowledge amounts to less than a hill of beans by your own admission. PostScript is a de facto standard (you know, the ones that people USE) and more applications read and write PostScript than CGI/CGM, and I honestly believe this will always be the case. Rememebr SIGGRAPH CORE ? >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. Like you said K*nt, you dont know anything about PostScript. Now Leo had the good taste to retract HIS bogus statements when it was pointed out to him he didnt know what he was talking about. The world waits for your apology, K*nt. >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. There are also "Encapsulated PostScript Files" that are READ by other applications, analagous to CGM. >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) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ When you know about what you speak of, come back and post again. Until then you are just tilting at windmills. > 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. This explains a lot. >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. No, K*nt, this is a mere pittance to the bandhwidth waste compared to your damn "pledge lists". At least now the net.gods have seen fit to give you a place where you can play without hurting yourslf. See you in alt.birthright. >K*nt, the electronic villiage idiot from xanth. -- Have a nice day or Klortho will rip your nuts off. richard@gryphon.CTS.COM rutgers!marque!gryphon!richard