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13
14<h1>Ghostscript projects seeking developers</h1>
15
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17
18<!-- [1.2 begin table of contents] ========================================= -->
19
20<h2>Table of contents</h2>
21
22<ul>
23<li><a href="#Platforms">Platforms</a>
24<li><a href="#Driver_architecture">Driver architecture</a>
25<li><a href="#Specific_drivers">Specific drivers</a>
26<li><a href="#Graphics_functionality">Graphics functionality</a>
27<li><a href="#Performance">Performance</a>
28<li><a href="#Other_functionality">Other functionality</a>
29<li><a href="#Other_implementation">Implementation improvements</a>
30</ul>
31
32<!-- [1.2 end table of contents] =========================================== -->
33
34<!-- [1.3 begin hint] ====================================================== -->
35
36<p>For other information, see the <a href="Readme.htm">Ghostscript
37overview</a>.
38
39<!-- [1.3 end hint] ======================================================== -->
40
41<hr>
42
43<!-- [1.0 end visible header] ============================================== -->
44
45<!-- [2.0 begin contents] ================================================== -->
46
47<p>
48There are many projects that would improve Ghostscript and that we would
49like to do, but for which we don't have enough resources.  If you would like
50to take responsibility for any of these projects, please <a
51href="mailto:raph@artofcode.com">contact us</a>.  Additional comments on
52implementation approaches or project goals are in <I>italic type like
53this</I>.
54
55<h2><a name="Platforms"></a>Additional platforms</h2>
56
57<h3>DOS, Windows and OS/2 builds using gcc.</h3>
58
59<p>
60We would like Ghostscript to work with the free <b><tt>emx/gcc</tt></b> and
61<b><tt>rsx</tt></b> libraries, to provide an alternative DOS, Windows
6295/98/NT, and OS/2 implementation that requires no proprietary, commercial
63compilers.  We think Ghostscript's existing OS/2 makefile already includes
64most of what is needed.  If someone is willing to do the work, we will be
65happy to include this in our list of supported platforms and to distribute
66the makefiles.
67
68<h3>Windows driver using Ghostscript as a language monitor.</h3>
69
70<p>
71MS Windows has a "language monitor" capability which would allow Ghostscript
72to be invoked seamlessly to process input files in any language Ghostscript
73could handle (currently PostScript and PDF) and for any printer for which
74Ghostscript had a driver.  Doing this properly would require integrating
75Ghostscript with Windows' "Add Printer" dialog, and would also require
76creating a PPD for Ghostscript.  <I>Russell Lang's RedMon program provides
77some, but not all, of this capability.</I>
78
79<h3>Netscape browser plug-in.</h3>
80
81<p>
82Currently, Ghostscript can work as a "helper application" for the Netscape
83browser, but not as a plug-in; the latter would integrate it more closely
84with the browser.  We aren't sure what doing this would involve; we've also
85heard by rumor that it's already been done.
86
87<h3>Ghostscript as an Active-X COM Object.</h3>
88
89<p>
90In order to integrate Ghostscript into XMetaL and other applications it
91would be convenient for Ghostscript to be distributed as a COM object
92along with the current gswin32.exe, gswin32c.exe and gsdll32.dll files.
93
94<h3>Visual Trace window for X.</h3>
95
96<p>
97Currently Ghostscript implements Visual Trace window for Windows only
98(see <I>wdtrace.c</I>). An implementation for X would be useful.
99
100<p>
101<hr>
102
103<h2><a name="Driver_architecture"></a>Driver Architecture</h2>
104
105<h3>Improved multi-threaded rendering support.</h3>
106
107<p>
108Currently, drivers can be written so that converting PostScript to a list of
109graphical objects can run in one thread, and rasterizing the objects can run
110in another thread.  However, drivers must be written specially if they are
111going to do this.  We would like to change the architecture so that any
112driver can work this way.  We would also like to support dual-threaded
113operation for drivers that produce high-level output, such as the PDF
114writer.  <I>Doing this would require separating banding from
115the multithreaded logic.  Also, currently each thread has its own allocation
116pool: this is unnecessary in the normal case, since Ghostscript now supports
117properly locked access to the C heap, but embedded systems still need to use
118a fixed-size area for the rasterizing thread.  With a locked, shared
119allocator, the rasterizing thread could use the full set of band list
120functions; with a fixed-size area and a separate allocator, only a subset is
121available, as is the case now for dual-threaded drivers.
122</I>
123
124<h3>Dynamic run-time loadable devices.</h3>
125
126<p>
127Currently, drivers must be linked into the executable.  We would like to be
128able to load drivers dynamically.  Doing this requires defining a
129platform-independent API (presumably extending the current gp_* APIs) that
130would work at least on Linux, vendor Unix, MS Windows, and Macintosh.  Unix
131systems should include Sun, HP, AIX, IRIX, DEC; Linux ELF and a.out formats
132should both be supported.  <I>Consider the Netscape plug-in
133architecture.</I>
134
135<h3>Moving 'setpagedevice' into C.</h3>
136
137<p>
138The PostScript 'setpagedevice' function implements matching of media and
139page size requests to available media, page orientation, and paper handling
140(duplex, etc.)  Currently it is implemented in PostScript code, which means
141it is not available for use with other input languages.  (It is available
142for PDF, which Ghostscript implements on top of PostScript, but not for the
143not-yet-freely-available PCL interpreters that use the Ghostscript library,
144or for possible future SVG or similar interpreters).  We would like to move
145this function into C.  <I>The device driver will be required to
146send page parameters up to PostScript to be stored in a resource.  To be
147included in this project are handling policy implementations in the device
148drivers.  DeferredMediaSelection should also be implemented.</I>
149
150<h3>Adding 'tee' for output to multiple devices.</h3>
151
152<p>
153In a few cases, it would be desirable to provide a 'tee' capability for
154drivers: specifically, for generating small, low-resolution 'thumbnail'
155images concurrently with other output.  <I>Probably the
156simplest way to do this is to generate a band list and then process it
157twice.  This is not completely trivial, since the band list does include
158device resolution information and scaling would be required for some
159constructs.</I>
160
161<h3><b><tt>OutputDevice</tt></b> resource category</h3>
162
163<p>
164Each available output device should provide an instance of the
165<b><tt>OutputDevice</tt></b> resource category, which gives the available
166page sizes, resolutions, media classes, process color models, and other
167information about the device.  <I>This would replace the current
168non-standard use of a 4-element <b><tt>PageSize</tt></b> in the
169<b><tt>InputAttributes</tt></b> entry of the page device dictionary.</I>
170
171<h3>Removing the limit on the length of OutputFile.</h3>
172
173<p>
174Currently, the maximum length of the <b><tt>OutputFile</tt></b> parameter is
175a compile-time constant, <b><tt>gp_file_name_sizeof</tt></b>.  This is
176appropriate for ordinary file names, since this constant is the platform's
177limit on the length of a file name.  However, if <b><tt>OutputFile</tt></b>
178is a pipe, the length should not be limited in this way.  <I>This is
179probably a small project: it requires allocating the file name dynamically,
180and freeing it in the finalization routine that gets called when a driver
181instance is freed.</I>.
182
183<h2><a name="Specific_drivers"></a>Specific drivers</h2>
184
185<h3>PrintGear and PPA output drivers.</h3>
186
187<p>
188We would like to provide (Adobe) PrintGear and (H-P) PPA output drivers for
189Ghostscript, but the specifications for these protocols are not published.
190If you can provide them to us without violating any agreements, please let
191us know.  (Some work has already been done on reverse-engineering these
192protocols, but we don't have references to it.)
193
194<h3>Improve 'pswrite' up to the level of 'pdfwrite'.</h3>
195
196<p>
197We would like to improve the high-level PostScript-writing
198<b><tt>pswrite</tt></b> driver to bring it up to parity with the PDF-writing
199driver (including the many improvements in the latter being implemented in
200Ghostscript 7.xx).  Specifically, we want it to write text as text rather
201than bitmaps, and to consistently write images in their original high-level
202form.  <I>We have already started to factor out code that
203should be common to these two drivers, specifically for writing embedded
204fonts and compressed data streams.</I>
205
206<p>
207There is one small part of this project that would be especially valuable
208and could be done independently (although it might have to be partly or
209entirely redone later): compressing images.  Currently the driver only
210compresses character bitmaps, and doesn't compress other images at all.
211<I>It should use the <b><tt>CCITTFaxEncode</tt></b> filter for 1-bit-deep
212images, and plane-separated <b><tt>LZWEncode</tt></b> compression for color
213images.  When generating LL3 PS, the
214<b><tt>Flate</tt></b> compression will work better than miGIF. It may be
215worth trying several methods on each image and use the one that works best.</I>
216
217<h3>High level graphics and text for PCL 5 and PCL XL drivers.</h3>
218
219<p>
220Currently, the PCL 5 drivers produce only bitmaps; the PCL XL driver
221produces high-level graphics and sometimes high-level images, but low-level
222text.  We would like to improve these drivers to produce higher-level,
223smaller output.  <I>This was a very low-priority project; it has become more
224important now that H-P's laser printers are shipping with less memory.</I>
225
226<h3>Improved high level GDI driver for Windows.</h3>
227
228<p>
229We would like a "GDI driver" for MS Windows that would implement more
230higher-level constructs (specifically for text).  <I> The
231<b><tt>mswin</tt></b> and <b><tt>mswinprn</tt></b> drivers both do some of
232this.  Some of the the 'xfont' support code for MS Windows should be useful.
233We were frustrated in the past because the GDI calls for getting font sizes
234and metrics consistently returned incorrect information and provided no way
235to get the correct information; perhaps this has been fixed in 32-bit
236Windows.  We believe that H-P, Russell Lang, and perhaps others are working
237in this area, but we can always use more help.</I>
238
239<h3>PDF thumbnail generation.</h3>
240
241<p>
242The PDF writer needs to be able to generate thumbnails (small previews).  We
243might do this through the 'tee' capability mentioned above.  However, we
244currently prefer the idea of implementing a completely separate program to
245add thumbnails to an arbitrary, existing PDF file: this would allow
246Ghostscript to add thumbnails to PDF files generated by other programs.
247<I>Much of the code needed to do this has already been written
248for Ghostscript's PDF linearizer: see
249<b><tt>lib/pdfwrite.ps</tt></b>.  A user has implemented this as well,
250using a separate program that calls Ghostscript: see
251<a href="http://www.uni-giessen.de/~g029/eurotex99/oberdiek/">
252http://www.uni-giessen.de/~g029/eurotex99/oberdiek/</a>.
253</I>
254
255<h3>Consolidate inkjet drivers into a single family.</h3>
256
257<p>
258In addition to factoring out the error diffusion code as described below, we
259would like to see another attempt at reducing the enormous volume of code
260for color inkjet drivers.  There are three sets of drivers (gdevcdj.c,
261gdevstc.c, gdevupd.c) with much overlapping functionality.  The latter two
262driver families make good attempts at factoring out things like head
263geometry and canned control strings, but we think this problem deserves
264another pass, especially in the hope of consolidating these drivers into a
265single family.
266
267<h3>Download glyph bitmaps (with glyph decaching notification).</h3>
268
269<p>
270See below under "Notification for glyph decaching."
271
272<h3>Preserve compression when writing PDF images.</h3>
273
274<p>
275Currently, all images are decompressed by the interpreter before being
276passed to the graphics library; the PDF writer may then compress them again.
277Ordinarily, this only slows things down a little, but in the case of
278DCT-encoded images that are being DCT-encoded in the output, image
279degradation may occur.  Ideally, the implementation should be smart enough
280to not decode and re-encode the image.  However, making this work properly
281is difficult.  <I>This would probably involve extending the library APIs for
282images so that they could pass a stream, possibly including filters, instead
283of the (fully decoded) data rows.</I>
284
285<h3>Emit warnings when producing PDF output.</h3>
286
287<p>
288Currently, the PDF writer has no way to emit warnings.  Users would like to
289see warnings when fonts cannot be embedded (this is actually required when
290the value of CannotEmbedFontPolicy is set to /Warning), and for some other
291questionable situations like non-existent Dests (Feature request
292<a href="http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=480853"
293class="offsite">#480853</a>).
294Probably the right way to handle this is with a pseudo device parameter
295called "Warnings" that is a list of strings: the pdfwrite driver would add
296strings to this list, and the ps2pdf script (lib/gs_pdfwr.ps) would read
297them out, print them, and reset them at the end of each page.
298
299<hr>
300
301<h2><a name="Graphics_functionality"></a>Graphics functionality</h2>
302
303<h3>Support for 64-bit colors on 64-bit platforms.</h3>
304
305<p>
306Currently, the library supports a maximum of 32 bits of data per pixel; we
307would like to raise this limit to 64 bits on systems where the 'long' data
308type is 64 bits wide.  <I>The <b><tt>gx_color_index</tt></b>
309type is already defined as 'long', but there are many places where the type
310<b><tt>bits32</tt></b> is used for pixel values; there is a 32-bit
311stored-image "device", but there is no 64-bit device; a few algorithms and
312tables have knowledge of the 32-bit width built into them, only because the
313C preprocessor doesn't have any kind of loop or repetition
314capability.</I>
315
316<h3>In-RIP trapping.</h3>
317
318<p>
319The PostScript specification includes an option for the interpreter to
320implement trapping (adjustments of object boundaries to prevent visual
321anomalies caused by slight misregistration of different ink layers): we
322would like to implement this.  <I>This is a complex and
323difficult area; even many Adobe RIPs don't do it.</I>
324
325<h3>Improve the font grid fitting and antialiasing.</h3>
326
327<p>
328Ghostscript includes a reduced True Type bytecode interpreter branched from FreeType 1.
329It performs a grid fitting for True Type glyphs except ones involving
330instructions patented by Apple. A wanted improvement is to implement
331a stem recognition algorithm similar to Free Type autohinting.
332It also would help to poorly designed Type 1 fonts, which have misplaced or missed hints.
333
334<p>
335Another useful improvement is to implement a font antialiasing with
336<b><tt>TextAlphaBits</tt></b> other than 1,2,4.
337
338<h3>ICC profile support for output.</h3>
339
340<p>
341Ghostscript 7.00 and later supports ICCBased color spaces of PDF
342using the icclib package from
343<a href="http://web.access.net.au/argyll/color.html ">
344http://web.access.net.au/argyll/color.html</a>
345but there is no facility to use ICC output (printer) profiles that
346may be embedded in the PDF. Also it would be useful for PostScript
347to be able to directly use a specific Intent from ICC profile to
348convert output colors (as CRD's are now used).
349<I>The primary difficulty is that the graphics library and PostScript
350always use CIE XYZ as the connection space, but ICC profiles may
351use CIELAB as the connection space, requiring conversion for use
352with the graphics library. </I>
353
354<h3>Making halftones into "objects" and adding new types.</h3>
355
356<p>
357Currently, knowledge of the specific data formats and algorithms for
358halftoning permeates too many places in the library.  We would like
359halftoning to be more "object oriented" (using virtual procedures) so that
360we could support other halftoning methods such as direct use of threshold
361arrays, or the double-rectangle approach added in newer PostScript versions.
362<I>Threshold arrays take much less space than the current
363representation, generally at the expense of longer rendering time for
364black-and-white images; double-rectangle representation would give us a
365better implementation of AccurateScreens.  We might want store both
366threshold arrays and the current representation.</I>
367
368<h3>Factor out error diffusion routines, integrate ETS.</h3>
369
370<p>
371Currently, several different inkjet drivers implement their own, very
372similar but slightly differing error diffusion methods.  This has caused
373severe code bloat as well as tempting future driver writers to contribute to
374it further.  We want to factor out error diffusion into a common set of
375facilities that drivers can use.  <I>We would like to design
376these facilities so that they can easily interface to the Even-Toned
377Screening algorithms from artofcode (Raph Levien), to the extent that these
378will be Open Source.</I>
379
380<h3>Improve, or generalize, linearization for stochastic threshold
381data.</h3>
382
383<p>
384The Ghostscript distribution includes a stochastic threshold array.  This
385array has some gamma correction built into it, which works well for some
386output devices and not for others.  We would like to provide a version of
387this array without (or with less) gamma correction.  <I>We have
388original data available from which this could be done fairly easily.</I>
389
390<h3>Change sampled functions to use new interpreted functions.</h3>
391
392<p>
393The PostScript language defines many functions relevant to graphics
394rendering as being implemented by arbitrary PostScript procedures: transfer
395(gamma correction), black generation, undercolor removal, several stages of
396CIE color space and rendering, and color mapping for Separation and DeviceN
397spaces.  Since the graphics library can't call PostScript procedures,
398Ghostscript currently samples these procedures at a fixed number of points
399and interpolates linearly between the samples.  As of Ghostscript 6.20, the
400library can interpret a restricted subset of PostScript procedures directly
401(basically those that only use arithmetic and comparisons: no loops,
402sub-procedures, or data structures).  Changing the rendering functions to
403use this approach when possible would greatly improve output quality when
404the functions are very non-linear (which we have actually seen in practice).
405<I>This should only be done if the function is, in fact,
406severely non-linear, since interpreting the function definition will almost
407always be much slower than interpolating in the table.</I>
408
409<h3>Replace PostScript procedures with Function objects.</h3>
410
411<p>
412Currently, there is a lot of tiresome code for doing callbacks with
413continuations for loading the caches that hold sampled values for the
414procedures listed under "Change sampled functions ..." above.  For the
415Separation and DeviceN tint transform functions, and only for these,
416PostScript code associated with the setcolorspace operator actually converts
417the PostScript procedure to a Function object -- to a FunctionType 4
418(PostScript subset) Function if possible, or to a FunctionType 0 (sampled)
419Function if not.  This approach should be used for all the other sampled
420functions.  Doing this would reduce the amount of C code significantly,
421while only increasing PostScript code slightly.
422
423<p>
424This change would require touching (and slightly changing) all PostScript
425operators that currently do such callbacks: for example, rather than a
426setblackgeneration operator that takes a PostScript procedure as its
427operand, we would have a .setblackgeneration operator that takes as operands
428both the PostScript procedure (so that currentblackgeneration can return it)
429*and* a Function derived from it (which will actually be used when loading
430the cache, or for sampling directly if desired).
431
432<p>
433In some cases, this approach has a non-negligible space cost.  If the
434PostScript procedure cannot be represented as a FunctionType 4 Function, it
435must be sampled and represented as a FunctionType 0 Function.  Then the BG /
436UCR / transfer / ... cache will essentially just hold a copy of the Function
437data.  While it is likely that this situation will be rare in practice, it
438might be worth looking into changing the internal representation of these
439caches so that they were the same as the representation of a FunctionType 0
440Function with a particular choice of parameters.  Then the PostScript code
441that called .buildsampledfunction when necessary could arrange the
442parameters to have the same values as the internal representation of the
443cache, and the cache could use the Function data directly.  This is probably
444not worth the trouble.
445
446<h3>Add optional cubic interpolation to RenderTable and other table
447lookup.</h3>
448
449<p>
450Currently, if a CIE rendering dictionary uses a lookup table for the final
451step, Ghostscript always interpolates linearly between the entries.  Cubic
452interpolation should be supported as an option.  A cubic interpolation
453option is also needed for general table-lookup Functions.
454
455<h3>Add better (SVG-like) alpha channel and compositing to library.</h3>
456
457<p>
458Ghostscript has partial support for alpha channel and for alpha and RasterOp
459compositing.  There is some architectural support for general compositing,
460but it postdates the RasterOp implementation, and most of the RasterOp code
461doesn't use it.  We expect that the more extensive compositing and alpha
462capabilities of SVG will find their way into PDF (and probably PostScript as
463well) in the course of 2000 and 2001, and we will need to implement them.
464
465<hr>
466
467<h2><a name="Performance"></a>Performance</h2>
468
469<h3>Change band list logic to defer halftoning until rendering.</h3>
470
471<p>
472Currently, when Ghostscript uses a band list, it does halftoning before
473banding.  It should do halftoning after banding: this produces smaller band
474lists and shifts more work to the rasterizer (which is good because the
475rasterizer can be multi-threaded internally for higher performance on
476multiprocessors: see the next topic.)
477
478<h3>Reduce redundant data for smoothed banded images.</h3>
479
480<p>
481When smoothed ("interpolated") images are written in the band list, extra
482rows must be written above and below each band in order to provide the data
483for interpolation.  Currently, the number of such rows is computed very
484conservatively; instead, the final interpolation algorithm should be
485consulted to provide the correct value.  <i>This is a small task.</i>
486
487<h3>Multi-threaded rasterizing</h3>
488
489<p>
490For high-resolution devices, rasterization dominates execution time.  On
491multiprocessor systems, Ghostscript can do tasks in parallel:
492
493<ul>
494
495<li>Rasterize multiple bands simultaneously;
496
497<li>Rasterize multiple color planes of a single band simultaneously (if a
498planar representation is being used);
499
500<li>For some computation-intensive tasks like smoothing images or filling
501large regions, partition the task (possibly buffering more data to allow
502larger-grain partitioning) and execute several partitions simultaneously.
503
504</ul>
505
506<p>
507We would want these facilities implemented so that no conditional
508compilation was involved: on uniprocessor systems, the locking API would
509simply have a vacuous implementation.
510
511<h3>Notification for glyph decaching.</h3>
512
513<p>
514Currently, drivers can't do a very good job of downloading rendered
515character bitmaps to the device they manage, because they can't find out
516when a bitmap is being deleted from Ghostscript's cache and therefore will
517never be referenced again.  Here is a sketch of how we would add this
518capability to the graphics library:
519
520<ul>
521
522<li>The driver would implement the <b><tt>text_begin</tt></b> call, simply
523to get access to a <b><tt>gs_imager_state</tt></b> that references the
524rendered character cache.  (The driver could always simply call the default
525implementation of <b><tt>text_begin</tt></b>.)
526
527<li>In the <b><tt>text_begin</tt></b> procedure, the driver would call
528
529<blockquote><pre>
530gs_glyph_decache_register(imager_state, notify_proc, proc_data)
531</pre></blockquote>
532
533<p>
534where <b><tt>proc_data</tt></b> was, or pointed to a structure that
535included, a pointer to the driver.
536
537<li><b><tt>gs_glyph_decache_register</tt></b> would use the general
538notification mechanism defined in <b><tt>gsnotify.h</tt></b> to call
539
540<blockquote><pre>
541notify_proc(proc_data, pchar_data)
542</pre></blockquote>
543
544<p>
545whenever a bitmap was removed from the character cache.
546<b><tt>pchar_data</tt></b> would point to some identification of the
547character; perhaps just the bitmap ID, but possibly a
548<b><tt>gx_cached_bits_common</tt></b> or even a <b><tt>cached_char</tt></b>.
549
550<li>The <b><tt>char_cache</tt></b> structure would be need an additional
551member, a <b><tt>gs_notify_list_t</tt></b>.  It would also need to add
552finalization so that when it was freed, it would notify and unregister all
553clients, using <b><tt>gs_notify_all(list, NULL)</tt></b> and then
554<b><tt>gs_notify_release</tt></b>.
555
556</ul>
557
558<p>
559<I>This facility was requested by the Display Ghostscript project, but it
560could also be used to improve the output of the PCL XL driver and possibly
561the X and PCL5 drivers.</I>
562
563<hr>
564
565<h2><a name="Other_functionality"></a>Other functionality</h2>
566
567<h3>OpenStep (Display PostScript + NeXT) extensions to Ghostscript.</h3>
568
569<p>
570There is a project to create a GNU implementation of the OPENStep API, which
571involves extending Ghostscript to provide the full functionality of Adobe's
572Display PostScript system with some of the NeXT extensions.  For more
573information, please contact Net-Community &lt;<a
574href="mailto:scottc@net-community.com">scottc@net-community.com</a>&gt;.
575
576<h3>Job Server implementation.</h3>
577
578<p>
579For full Adobe PostScript compatibility, Ghostscript needs a real "job
580server" to encapsulate the execution of PostScript files.
581<I>See the section on "Job Execution Environment" in the PostScript
582Language Reference Manual for details.</I>
583
584<h3>SVG (XML Structured Vector Graphics) interpreter.</h3>
585
586<p>
587Ghostscript could be adapted with some work to read SVG.  This would be an
588interesting and challenging project because SVG's graphics model would
589require extending the library (see above).  <I>If SVG turns out to be an
590important standard, it is important that there be a good free implementation
591of it.</I>
592
593<h3><b><tt>%font%</tt></b> and other IODevices.</h3>
594
595<p>
596Currently, the <b><tt>%font%</tt></b> IODevice is not implemented.  We would
597like to see this implemented using a general framework for implementing
598IODevices (%xxxx%) entirely in PostScript, in an "object oriented" manner
599very similiar to the way Resource categories are implemented.  An IODevice
600would be implemented as a dictionary with the following keys, whose values
601would be procedures that implemented the corresponding operation:
602
603<blockquote><pre>
604/File
605/DeleteFile
606/RenameFile
607/Status
608/FileNameForAll
609/GetDevParams
610/PutDevParams
611</pre></blockquote>
612
613<p>
614There would only be global IODevices, no local ones; the dictionary keeping
615track of them would be stored in global VM.
616
617<p>
618<I>This is an obscure feature that matters only because some PostScript code
619uses <b><tt>filenameforall</tt></b> with this IODevice, rather than
620<b><tt>filenameforall</tt></b> with the <b><tt>/Font</tt></b> Resource
621category, to enumerate available fonts.</I>
622
623<h3>Repairing damaged or EOL-converted PDF files.</h3>
624
625<p>
626Adobe Acrobat Reader can scan a PDF file that has had its end-of-lines
627converted by careless users transferring the file across operating systems
628as text rather than binary across, and reconstruct the cross-reference table
629which the PDF interpreter requires.  This only works if the file has no
630binary data in it, which with PDF 1.3 is rarely the case.  However, users
631occasionally receive PDF files that have been damaged in this way, and it
632might be useful to have a program that can repair them.  <I>We think this
633should probably be done as a separate program, possibly in PostScript,
634similar to Ghostscript's PDF linearizer.</I>
635
636<h2><a name="Other_implementation"></a>Implementation improvements</h2>
637
638<h3>Fully re-entrant code.</h3>
639
640<p>
641Currently, neither the PostScript interpreter nor the graphics library is
642fully re-entrant (no writable globals).  Making them fully re-entrant would
643make Ghostscript usable in multi-threaded environments, and more easily
644usable in embedded environments.  Note that this is necessary, but far from
645sufficient, for Ghostscript to allow simultaneous execution of a single
646Ghostscript interpreter instance by multiple threads: that is probably
647permanently out of the question.  <I>Almost all drivers, including all of
648the drivers in devs.mak which are maintained as part of the main Ghostscript
649code, are already fully re-entrant; making the remaining ones re-entrant
650should really be up to the driver author.</I>
651
652<h3>Ghostscript has no %ram% device.</h3>
653
654<p>
655The %ram% device is documented in PS Supplement 3010 and 3011 dated August 30, 1999.
656This is probably not a major impediment to portability, but it would be handy.
657<p><I>
658On Unix, the suggested implementation would be to create a subdirectory
659of the temporary directory (usually /tmp), with the name chosen and the
660directory created in such a way as to avoid /tmp races and similar
661problems. Ghostscript should delete the subdirectory when it exits.
662</I>
663
664<!-- [2.0 end contents] ==================================================== -->
665
666<!-- [3.0 begin visible trailer] =========================================== -->
667<hr>
668
669<p>
670<small>Copyright &copy; 2000 Aladdin Enterprises.  All rights
671reserved.</small>
672
673<p>
674This software is provided AS-IS with no warranty, either express or
675implied.
676
677This software is distributed under license and may not be copied,
678modified or distributed except as expressly authorized under the terms
679of the license contained in the file LICENSE in this distribution.
680
681For more information about licensing, please refer to
682http://www.ghostscript.com/licensing/. For information on
683commercial licensing, go to http://www.artifex.com/licensing/ or
684contact Artifex Software, Inc., 101 Lucas Valley Road #110,
685San Rafael, CA  94903, U.S.A., +1(415)492-9861.
686
687<p>
688<small>Ghostscript version 8.53, 20 October 2005
689
690<!-- [3.0 end visible trailer] ============================================= -->
691
692</body>
693</html>
694