In reply to "Lee Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>> i just released a postscript/pdf viewer for ggi, i use it primarily to
>> view files under the console. the name is `psv', and it is at
>> sourceforge
>>
>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/psv
>
>I got your program. I like it a lot. Andreas Beck mentioned the
>anti aliasing. I am curious as to how AA is done. I liked your
>documentation as well. It helps any wanna be hacker. I am also
>curious why it's not faster. The display is fine but the page
>loading is slow. How do xdvi and gv accomplish faster loading?
version 1.2 has anti-aliasing implemented already via ghostscript.
it consists of (simplifying a *lot*) rendering the page at a higher
resolution and averaging the values for the lower resolution.
regarding speed, xdvi is a completely different beast, being at the
same time a viewer and an interpreter -- therefore it can be much much
faster. i am working slowly on a ggi dvi viewer now, but you can try
my 'dview' hack (on ggi ftp i guess) and see for yourself that the
speed is much higher.
gv and psv are only interfaces to ghostscript. the difference is that
there is a driver in ghostscript that is tailor-made for gv, namely
the 'x' driver. with this driver, gv itself needs to do little (i
think), everything is done directly to the x window by ghostscript.
with psv i have to (a) dump the page contents to ghostscript, which is
reasonably fast, (b) wait for ghostscript to process the page, and (c)
get the page back. step (c) kills everything - as you can see -
because loading the big page description takes time. step (b) is also
slower than it could be because it generates a big page description
that would otherwise be unecessary. if there was a `ggi' driver for
ghostscript, then things would be much faster, because step (c) would
be eliminated, and step (b) could then be made much more efficient.
on the other hand, if someone can patch psv and make it as fast as gv
(or more), i would be vary happy to incorporate it to the official
distribution. maybe some obscure driver that i missed would make it
faster... (i actually looked into the gdevmem driver, but found little
that could help -- not even counting the fact that debian ghostscript
does not have this driver)
what i find rather amazing is that psv is much faster under the
console than under x. i can't quite explain it, except perhaps for x
being slow by nature...
--
Cesar Augusto Rorato Crusius __o __o __o __o __o
Stanford University _`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _`\<,
e-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_)
www.stanford.edu/~crusius
o _ _ _
__o __o __o __o /\_ _ \\o (_)\__/o (_)
_`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _`\<, _>(_) (_)/<_ \_| \ _|/' \/
(_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_)/(_) (_) (_) (_) (_)' _\o_
He who sacrifices functionality for ease of use
Loses both and deserves neither
