Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 19:02:51 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: asu1 AT cornell DOT edu
cc: "A. Sinan Unur" <sinan DOT unur AT cornell DOT edu>, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: setting up dviwin for djgpp tex distribution
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.971210100947.26217A-100000@travelers.mail.cornell.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.971210185437.11548B-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Precedence: bulk


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.