World: r3wp

How's your literate tool coming along?

only problem is that this will take time so i'm not sure i can give 
an eta. however, qtask needs pdf output so this should happen soon 
enough.

I guess closures will help in programming some like TeX.

i haven't worked on wetan much in the last weeks. busy with other 
things. but i need it so i hope to be back to it soon.

Tracking all those margins , current text positions, translations, 
rotations etc.

so will rebol 3 be able to count presice metrics for fonts etc.?

surely that's not part of Rebol 3.

It would have to be an add on product.

hmm, r3 will have rich text, but i don't think there are any plans 
for a real typesetter.

what's this new typeset! function then :)

just kidding ...

:-)

;)

once you have a typesetter written in rebol, though, you can apply 
it to draw too; draw doesn't offer the low level access to font data 
you need, so that will need to be separate; but if you can do it 
for pdf, you can do it for whatever, if you use the same fonts.

So, that also mean creating bitmaps for direct printing?

well.... i guess to image! can help with that.

unless you want to rewrite AGG in rebol ;)

just a quick question .. was it hard/easy to do images in pdf-maker 
?

I'm guessing the same operations are used to include images in postscript.

you just include the raw rgb data

and, in pdf 1.4, optional alpha channel data

so, there's no translation involved ?

inverting the image?

in ps you have to encode the data i guess

you need to invert the alpha channel because it's the opposite in 
rebol

but you can do that as a filter in pdf

since 0x0 is bottom left in ps, and top left in Rebol ...

but for images samples, the first sample is the top left corner

so i don't have to reorder the pixels in pdf maker if that's what 
you are asking

Is there anything that can be done for R3/draw  that helps support 
pdf/postscript creation?

A lack of a printing solution after all these years is still a thing 
in my book.

the problem is that printing is a broad term

it may mean printing a document (i.e. typesetting), or just printing 
what you have on screen

the fact that every os has its own way to handle printing doesn't 
help

on unix you usually create ps and send it to the print spooler

on windows you need to use gdi

on osx i guess you need to create a pdf

Doesn't OSX have a postscript interpreter in it ?

OSX uses LPR, I think

Or did that change?

henrik, does it take ps too?

I think we don't have many choices - you can to-image your layout, 
or go for external engines, using some make-docs - pdf, postscript, 
html plus css standard ...

postscript works on a different level. it's OS wide in OSX. I think 
it converts everything to PDF before printing, because all graphics 
are PDF centric.

if windows handled ps i guess we'd have a good solution. it would 
have been easier for me to write a ps maker instead of a pdf maker 
:)

gabriele, I would think it does. I have to convert docs to PS if 
I want them printed under Linux with LPR

lpr, per se, does not mandate a document format

it just spools documents to the printer

originally documents were text files

and, if you had a ps printer, ps files

how "good" is already w3c's stuff here? I mean html plus css and 
it's media (printing) capabilities? browsers are everywhere ....