Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!ncar!unmvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!dsg.csc.ti.COM!Kimbrough
From: Kimbrough@dsg.csc.ti.COM (Kerry Kimbrough)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: CGM Metafile Integration
Message-ID: <2812064303-11953011@Sierra>
Date: 10 Feb 89 00:58:23 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 21


   > Is there a mail list out there for these issues? If not, 
   > anyone interested in starting one? 

Let's just use xpert.

   > 1. make a screen number (e.g. unix:99) be the hardcopy device 
   > 2. set a switch in Xlib and save the wire protocal as a metafile
   > 3. write a whole new set of Xlib routines to handle hardcopy

Another possibility is to extend Xlib to handle a metafile as a new kind of
drawable.  (Perhaps this is what you meant by #3?) This would capture the part
of the protocol that is relevant (output requests, graphic context creation).
This is better than #1 and #2 because a metafile is much more analogous to a
drawable than it is to a screen or a display. This *would* require source
changes to existing clients, but they would be small.

A standard metafile extension to Xlib might want to produce a standard metafile
format (i.e.  CGM).  However, it might be better to produce a vanilla data
encoding of the metafile output requests which could then be translated into CGM
or any number of other metafile formats.