More backend thoughts

[David Feuer]

Sorry... My last message had an entirely inappropriate subject line.

David

>
> Update on thoughts for the PostScript part of a redesigned backend system:
>
> - Stop using postscript coordinate translation altogether.  This will
> increase the space needed to represent coordinates, but
>
> - Optionally (user option) we can use PostScript binary encoding, so
> coordinates can be IEEE floating point numbers, represented 4-5 bytes
> of PostScript, which will expand to around 5 or around six, depending,
> to make 7-bit ASCII.
>
> Fonts:
> - The note/accidental/whatever font should get an encoding vector, if
> it doesn't already have one.
> - CID fonts should always be used with CMaps
>
> Once this is done, we can use xyshow instead of glyphshow.  Even
> better, as we traverse the page stencil to draw the page, instead of
> immediately showing the glyphs we put them in a list to show later.
> We sort the list by font and color, so then we only need to switch to
> each font once per page.  Each (font, color) pair will typically get a
> single xyshow.  Furthermore, we can extract a list of fonts from the
> show list, and even make arrangements for font subsetting!
>
> My computer battery is dying now, so I'll send this.
>
> David
>