Hello Vadim,
>
> I think that it's still a question if we need something like Quartz on
> Linux/UNIX.
> MacOS X requires 128MB of RAM to run, and I can guess most of this RAM is
> consumed by MacOS X's User Interface/Imaging Model.
> I don't know exactly how much of RAM Quartz takes, but I can guess *a lot*.
> Is it really necessary for general imaging/printing solution?
>
The reason why MacOS X "consumes" so much memory is simply that it allocates
a whole 32-bit pixmap for _each_ window it creates. Hence a 800x600 window
takes about 2 Mb of memory, even if it's empty..
If you think about it, caching the full content of windows is the most
simple (and probably performance-efficient) way to support the most
important features of the OS X GUI (like full transparency +
Genie effects)
Normally, the pixmaps are allocated within the video card's memory, even
though "ps" will never tell you that.. Good ole Unix users will tell you
X11 does about the same thing sometimes ;-) I'm pretty convinced that as
soon as someone starts to use the Render extension to implement similar
capabilities, it will certainly start eating as many bytes :-)
Anyway, developers are mainly interested in the simple and
device-independent API that Quartz provides to generate
high-quality documents, not the bells-and-whistle things.
I advise you to take a look at the documentation available on the
Apple developers site. The Quartz 2D imaging model is very similar
to Java2D, you can also think about it as Qt's "QPainter" on steroids
:-)
> PostScript/PDF provides both Document Infrastructure and
> Representation/Visualization of data/documents. Well, it works but who said
> (except Adobe) that this provides really the best solution?
>
The great thing about PDF is its imaging model and graphics operators.
its document infrastructure isn't that pretty, in my opinion, even if
it's much better than Postscript.. which is certainly why it isn't used
or exposed by Quartz2D. As an example, SVG has a _fine_ XML-based
infrastructure that makes processing and editing of structured
documents much easier (unfortunately, it is page-only-oriented :-()
As for Postscript, it's a (very slowly) dying printer output technology.
We'll probably never completely get rid of it, if only to support all
those very expensive printers installed everywhere ;-)
> If you start thinking about auto-converting to Type1, a lot of issues come to
> mind (missing PostScript glyph names, hinting, subset/range embedding), and
> there is no simple solution for those issues.
>
No, but these have been implemented multiple times, in various different ways
(e.g. Qt, Gnome-Print, StarOffice/OpenOffice to name just three of them). Wouldn't
it be better if we had a single system-wide service to perform this instead ??
At least, this would guarantee consistent results, and we would be able to
improve the service without touching the applications and toolkits that use
it..
> Unfortunately, I don't know how it's handled in MacOS X/Quartz.
> Does Quartz convert TT to Type1 or to Type3? If it converts to Type1, what
> kind of *auto-hinting* algorithm Apple uses?
> Does somebody have experience with this and can comment?
>
>From my experience, it seems that Quartz uses a small number of
classic monochrome bitmap fonts, and _unhinted_ anti-aliased fonts.
(Nautilus does this, by the way). they do sub-pixel positioning too..
And this doesn't seem to be problematic, since the fonts provided
by the system are generally highly legible. Maybe they're using some
advanced aa rasterizer / filter too, but I have been unable to spot
hinting in most text displayed by MacOS X. Darn, I'd like to be
proven wrong on this :-)
Also have a look at the new text engine in Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0,
its anti-aliased hinter is much different than in previous versions,
and I suspect they perform some sort of auto-hinting, instead of using
the hints provided in the fonts..
Regards,
- David
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