Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu!zwicky
From: zwicky@pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu (Elizabeth D. Zwicky)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: currentpath and setpath
Message-ID: <20746@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 25 Aug 88 20:47:35 GMT
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science
Lines: 23

I've been working on a program recently where I wanted to keep
some paths around to re-use them later, and trying to use "currentpath"
and "setpath". My *best* results so far have been no output.
At worst, my window system hangs. The intermediate possibility
is an "invalidaccess" error executing "pathforallvec" when I
try to do a stroke. You can get the no results effect by starting
up psh, typing executive, giving it the path of your choice
(0 0 moveto 100 100 lineto, for instance), and typing "currentpath
setpath stroke". Nothing happens. For a more impressive demonstration,
do a "10 setlinewidth", do the random path "currentpath setpath stroke"
again (producing the invalidaccess error), *and then actually draw a line*.
In the version of NeWS we run, this appears to have the result
of scaling by the linewidth. I do not have a good repeat-by for the
total hang result yet; narrowing it down is understandably slow, since
I keep having to reboot my Sun...

Is this a result of running 1.1 Beta instead of real 1.1? Am I
smoking my socks? Is NeWS smoking its socks? I know (from hacking
on printers) how to do a grody disgusting hack that fakes a
currentpath using pathforall, but I was really hoping that there would
be a clean way to do this and "currentpath" looked so good.

Elizabeth D. Zwicky
(zwicky@cis.ohio-state.edu)