Re: [Fresco-devel] Re: Newbie confusion

On Sat, Nov 23, 2002 at 12:50:38PM -0700, M. Evans wrote:
> Thank you Thomas, that does clear things up quite a bit.
> 
> I might suggest that Fresco add some of this Q&A to the FAQ pages (not
> verbatim, but edited; feel free to use my words as you see fit).

Probably a good idea.

Say, since you're the one who had the confusion in the first place,
you're the one with the best idea as to what actually helped clarify
things; ergo, you're the best one to fix the FAQ ;-).  It's in the
Wiki, anyone can edit it...

Or perhaps one of us will get around to it :-).

> The only point I might discuss further is this notion of "outputting"
> to DisplayPDF.  I guess that is true, Fresco could do that.  However I
> was driving at another point altogether.  My curiosity was why Fresco
> re-invented resolution independent graphics given the existing choices
> (PDF, PS, others).  Maybe it had something to do with the legacy
> code bequeathed to Fresco from years past.  In that context, I
> wonder how Fresco's resolution-independent graphics system differs in
> capability from PS or PDF.

It has nothing to do with legacy code; all our code has been
more-or-less rewritten, the the DrawingKit API is entirely new.
However, it's really not all that different from Postscript or PDF's
imaging model -- it's stack based, vector drawing commands, etc. -- so
I don't know that it makes much of a difference in capabilities, or
really anything besides names of the actual API calls.  (On the other
hand, I don't know enough about DisplayPDF/DisplayPS to say for sure.)
Probably they have some capabilities we don't (gradients?  color
support for sure, etc.), but adding those to the API is simple; the
hard part is actually writing the rendering code :-)).

Besides which, the drawing API is mostly internal to the server;
clients, generally speaking, don't use it at all.  So if we wanted to
change it sometime, it wouldn't even be that hard.

-- Nathaniel

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