World: r3wp

300dpi = 300 ticks in an inch.  if you know the printer edges to 
be 1/2 inch, then you can juste calculate a 2250 wide bitmap (using 
US letter size paper)  and send it .  this works.  simple math .

I used to do it on amiga...

If I knew how PCL wraps images I'd do it on PC too... I've just not 
needed to do printing with rebol, for which html didn't solve my 
needs... yet...

one of the reasons also for a DRAW block is that you can preview 
your output first. Not so easy with PDF Maker...

not saying its not needed.

and you can scale it to whatever resolution...

a good solution might be to use decimal 0-1 values and just recompute 
them to whatever output you are using (so adapt to any paper/bitmap 
size)

geomol, on feedback, I'm not entirely sure what the initial supported 
functions could be since I'm not an expert on DRAW, but at least 
support for text and vector graphics. the coordinate system for DRAW 
and PS would be nice if it could work identically.

DRAW uses pixels... I am pretty sure PS does not.

right, but that should be translatable? DRAW can scale graphics up 
or down.

to simulate DPI density

yes.

AGG DRAW is pure vector gfx

Ok, text and vector graphics ... and some grey-tone/colour for a 
start. And then the rotate, scale and translate, that's already included 
in my postscript dialect.

what about page handling, page sizes, page breaks, etc?

the view preview does not have to be perfect .. it just has to be 
good enough.

positioning and size is the most important in the preview. rendering 
and prettiness is less important

for line elements, and text, that should not be a problem ( given 
the same fonts ).

All the more exotic drawing commands may be though.

Like you, I'm primarily interested in text, and lines ( my application 
uses LaTeX at present to do text ).

I need to output tables and text at specific locations as well as 
bar codes

straight lines, boxes

that should be very easy to do with a postscript dialect.

managing line thickness is going to be important, but that may not 
be so hard

thickness?

of lines, or text, or what?

of lines

I've seen a problem with a barcode reader that could not read codes 
printed from one expensive printer and it would read them fine if 
printed from another cheap printer

line thickness can be specified in both ps and view.

turned out the expensive printer was able to separate two parallel 
lines just by a hair's width, where they should appear as a single 
line at double width of one line. that made the barcodes unreadable.

that was bad programming.

it relied a printer deficiency to work.

I didn't discover the error until I tried it on the expensive printer. 
besides the size and position of the line was supposed to be correct. 
the barcode was created with PDF Maker

and it looks correct when viewed in a PDF Viewer

even when you drill down on the bars to high resolution?  Remember 
screen res is only 72 dpi .. lower than your cheap printer.

PS has setlinewidth, and setting it to 0 will make is as thin, as 
the device can do.

John, before we go further in developing this, I would like to know 
what license is going to be applied.  I note that yu have copyright 
nicomsoft in the header.

I think it would be good if someone could produce some draw scripts 
of varying difficulty, and then we can see how far we can get in 
rendering these to ps.

easiest might be some text and lines .. then boxes, circles, fills 
.. then gradient fills etc.

like a test suite for any dialect that is written.

Funny, I was just thinking about that. I think, I'll just make the 
first dialect being a small subset of PS, and then license can be 
the one, Carl talked about in a blog. Was it BSD?

Free for all use.

We could then put it in the Library, and others can develop it further. 
(Maybe that should be coordinated somehow?)

Is that ok?

graham, even if I take a good PDF viewer and zoom all the way in

so it's probably a problem with the printer, but still one that should 
be solvable by setting the width of the line jsut a few hair's width 
thicker

geomol, BSD license is yummy. please proceed. :-)

BSD is good.

I've only done bar code printing using bar code fonts .. not directly 
in pdf-maker.

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=ean13.r
<--- did this one a year ago. it uses PDF maker to generate barcodes