Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Question from Ignorant
Message-ID: <3486@phri.UUCP>
Date: 16 Sep 88 13:50:12 GMT
References: <692@clinet.FI>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 29

toweri@clinet.UUCP (Jukka Lindgren) writes:
> Until now I have thought that the postscript doesn't "draw" individual
> letters, but merely "tells" the type-setter that "there is the beginning
> of text column (x1,y1) and it ends at (x2,y2) and it contains the
> following text with following type- and size setting.
> 
> Am I right or am I right ?

Not really.  Yes, at one level you are right.  I can do:

	/Helvetica findfont 12 scalefont setfont
	72 72 moveto (Print me) show

which tells the PostScript interpreter to print a given string at a given
place on the page using a given size of a given font.  But, if you look at
the font machinery closer, you see that each letter in the font has been
described at some earlier time with some combination of the usual graphics
operators (lineto, curveto, stroke, fill, etc).  There is a complicated
font cache mechanism which lets you do this just once and then use the
cached letterform bitmaps again and again to save time, but fundamentally
the letters are drawn using the graphic primitives.

	The PostScript font generation machinery is general enough that you
can create and use filled, stroked, or even bitmap fonts if you want to.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"