[vtk-developers] gl2ps

[Micha Bieber]

Tuesday, November 18, 2003, 07:28:11, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:

PR> How do you define "key" feature?  How about the gl2ps stuff?  I asked
PR> about it before 4.0 and it would be sad if users had to wait till 5.0
PR> were released in mid-2004 to use it in a stable release.

This remark might be helpful in your planning concerning gl2ps
inclusion:
The current state of gl2ps seems to be fairy stable, and especially
the new possibilities for compressed PS and PDF output should produce
sufficient small output files also for more complex 3D scenes. The
minimalistic C interface should not change in the future besides
adding some new options (not breaking the existing interface).
So far, so good.
At this moment, we are in the very midst of implementing transparency
for the library, hoping to finish before christmas. This requires
intensive testing for the PDF part, simply caused through the sheer
amount of blending constellations and some difficulties in grasping
the concept from the PDF spec (no joke :-). As far, as I can see at
this time, the full gl2ps implementation will support the following
features:

- Almost (or all) OpenGL blending combinations
- Varying alpha values for single OpenGL primitives
  (in a vector oriented manner, also for shaded objects)
- Pix-/bitmap (alpha channel) based blending


Micha   
--