World: r3wp

Not familiar with postscript, I am wondering why you couldn't just 
make a function "to-postscript" that accepts a face argument (similar 
to to-image), instead of reimplementing all of VID.

yes, I have a base face similar to vid-face. I even added it to the 
style list manually to see if that would work, but it doesn't.

Anton, good idea.

Anton, thanks. Now it's moving forward. Got some primitive face renderings 
in postscript now.

I suppose you would be cloning face/color, face/text, face/edge rendering 
(whatever you need first) at a simple level, and gradually improving 
it towards perfection afterwards.

My biggest problem right now is the coordinate system, vertical positioning 
of text and text wrapping. The rest is almost in place.

http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/vid-postscript.png<--- so far so 
good :-)

(I wish I had thought of this sooner!)

That looks like fun, Henrik.

I've already fixed top/middle/bottom alignment. Text is placed a 
couple of mm too far to the right.

I suppose you don't know how to do the equivalent of SIZE-TEXT in 
postscript yet.

Actually I rely fully on VID's coordinate system. SIZE-TEXT in PS 
is apparently only possible on the width of the text, not the height, 
which is why just I use VID instead. It seems to work fine, if we 
can live with integer positioning.

Mmm. The font rendering looks nicer.

text wrapping is a different problem...

Ah yes, I see.

Remembering from amacleod's multi-highlight problem, detecting where 
wraps are in a text box might be buried in some natives that we can't 
get to.

I solved that in caret-to-offset-patch.r

It behaves very very close to native (except efficiency), so should 
be usable for this situation.

http://anton.wildit.net.au/rebol/patch/caret-to-offset-patch.r

thanks, I'll have a look

and the test file to do is test-caret-to-offset-patch.r

If you want to save yourself literally days of reverse engineering...

so you essentially rebuild caret-to-offset as a mezzanine?

Yep, and offset-to-caret, too.

Too deep for me to solve that tonight. However I've come this far:

http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/vid-postscript2.png

if you track the font size, then you have the vertical size of the 
text.

Improving... How fast can it render the postscript ? Can you make 
it dynamic update ?

Graham, the relationship between font/size and lineheight is not 
so simple, unfortunately.

in postscript ...

Anton, by far the slowest component is Ghostscript. Creating the 
postscript file is about as fast as an ordinary layout.

The advantage is that it's rendered from faces, not VID directly, 
so I assume this will work with RebGUI as well.

Anton, it takes about 2-5 seconds to create the render here

Henrik, what exactly are you doing?

Graham, I'm creating postscript output from faces. That's all.

cool

it works like TO-IMAGE.

so, for multiple pages?

one page per layout

so, to produce the postscript from multiple layouts?

foreach l layouts [to-postscript l]

so this produces a single page of postscript?

each to-postscript call produces one single page.

that means if you have 4 pages, you create 4 separate layouts and 
call to-postscript 4 times.

but it's quite possible that I could deliver a block of layouts...

...to to-postscript to generate multiple pages in one go.

that's what I do at present ... I have a block of layouts

and then i generate a single page of postscript from all the layouts

a single page from multiple layouts?

yes

no

one postscript file but multiple pages