4/5/2023 0 Comments Quickdraw enginesIt is not clear when the projects merged, but this was a common theme in Apple at the time. The system also supported "desktop printers" (printers that appeared as icons on the user's desktop), a long sought-after feature missing from QD, and added improved printing dialogs and controls. Additionally the new system was deliberately engineered to be as flexible as possible, supporting not only QD and PS printers, but potentially other standards such as Hewlett Packard's PCL as well. Whereas developers had earlier been forced to write their own code to convert their QuickDraw on-screen display to PostScript for printing, under the new printer architecture such conversions would be provided by the OS. This project later took on an expanded role when Apple and Microsoft agreed to work together to form an alternative to PostScript fonts, which were extremely expensive, creating the TrueType effort based on Apple's existing efforts.Īnother project, apparently unrelated at first, attempted to address problems with the conversion from QuickDraw into various printer output formats. The system also included a system for "wrapping" existing PostScript Type 1 fonts into its own internal format, which added bitmap preview versions for quick on-screen rendering. Included in the font rendering engine were a number of generally useful extensions, notably a fixed point coordinate system and a variety of curve drawing commands. GX appears to have started in a roundabout fashion, originally as an outline font system that would be added to the Mac OS. For example, QuickDraw could not easily support advanced graphics transformations such as rotations and shears, and introducing new data types such as curves was impossible. This increased the complexity of developing color applications for Macs. Color QuickDraw, introduced in 1987, was a tremendous kludge on top of the original black and white QuickDraw. Worse, the GrafPort structure was designed to be directly embedded in third-party developer data structures, so Apple could not add new variables. The central data structure in QuickDraw was the GrafPort, a structure with all of the member variables exposed.
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