Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/12/10/12:06:05
On Wed, 10 Dec 1997 asu1 AT cornell DOT edu wrote:
> eli, thanks for your response. i must admit i have absolutely no idea
> what is involved in writing a dvi previewer. i was looking at the dvivga
> source last night but i am having a hard time following the flow.
Tell me about it... ;-) I was lucky I only needed to find the places
where it looks for the font files and figure out how to call the Kpathsea
functions instead.
> is there any document or other source of information outlining what is
> involved? where should i look?
The hard problem is to know how do you translate the font description into
graphics commands which draw the characters. If you don't know anything
about the DVI format and the formats of the fonts used by the DVI drivers
(that's my situation), then I'd suggest to post a question to
comp.text.tex news group and ask where to find that info, since I don't
know.
Another, faster way would be to look into the sources of dvilj or dvips
and try to figure that out. These programs are written much better, and
if you know PostScript or the PCL commands, you might be able to
understand what they are doing by looking at the printer commands they
generate. dvivga should also explain that, if you only look at the code
which draws pixels and disregard the rest.
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