Richard Robinson wrote: >> I also added some little modifications to jcabc2ps, so that it interprets >> sequences like, e.g., '\vc' as 'put a hacek on the letter c' and inserts >> the appropriate postscript in its output. >> >> The postscript part should, as far as I can tell, not depend on any >> specific output devices but be fairly 'portable postscript', if such a >> beast indeed exists. ;-) For other output methods than postscript, this >> will be of no help whatsoever, of course. > >It could still be helpful, though. If this gives us programs that will >have a general way of getting accents printed, that will hopefully >clarify their use (and thereby encourage people away from "it works on >my machine" character-set-dependent numbers) and, as you say, hopefully >end up as Standard. ... What other output methods would it affect ? >The big GUI apps, I suppose, that need to display on-screen. And print - >does Barfly, for example, print via postscript ?
If a postscript printer is selected, then everything gets printed via postscript; however, BarFly doesn't output postscript directly. Instead, everything which would normally be drawn onscreen is captured into a picture in PICT format. A PICT contains a mixture of vector graphics, bitmap graphics and text strings (with the appropriate font, style, colour etc information). The PICT is then translated to postscript by the printer driver and sent to the printer (or to a file if you want). I have no control over the process once the printer driver takes over, so I can't mess directly with the postscript. If I want to implement unusual characters I either have to find a font which includes them, or draw them myself from graphics primitives, which is what I do with musical symbols. BarFly was never intended to be a musical typesetter. It is optimised to produce the best display possible on screen (at least that's the intention). When that is printed out at high resolution the results are neat and highly legible, but not publication quality. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
