Category : C Source Code
Archive   : GHSTSCPT.ZIP
Filename : HISTORY.DOC

Copyright (C) 1989 Aladdin Enterprises. All rights reserved.
Distributed by Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This file is part of Ghostscript.

Ghostscript is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. No author or distributor accepts responsibility
to anyone for the consequences of using it or for whether it serves any
particular purpose or works at all, unless he says so in writing. Refer
to the Ghostscript General Public License for full details.

Everyone is granted permission to copy, modify and redistribute
Ghostscript, but only under the conditions described in the Ghostscript
General Public License. A copy of this license is supposed to have been
given to you along with Ghostscript so you can know your rights and
responsibilities. It should be in a file named COPYING. Among other
things, the copyright notice and this notice must be preserved on all
copies.

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This file, history.doc, describes the changes in the various releases of
Ghostscript.

This file applies to version 1.2 of Ghostscript. For an overview of
Ghostscript and a list of the documentation files, see README.

Version 1.2
===========

Interpreter
-----------

Adds the new facilities in version 25 of PostScript: //name for immediate
lookup, packed arrays (setpacking, currentpacking, packedarray operators),
and new font cache parameters (setcacheparams, currentcacheparams
operators).

Adds new operators (setfileposition, currentfileposition) for random
access to files.

Extends readhexstring to take either a string or a file, just like token.

Fixes a bug that caused the 'for' operator (and a couple of others) to
randomly smash memory locations on PC platforms.

Library
-------

Renames the init_device driver procedure as open_device, and adds a
corresponding close_device.

Adds new procedures to read and set the cache limit values (implementing
the currentcacheparams and setcacheparams operators).

Usage procedures
----------------

Changes the name of the Unix makefile to ux-cc-x.mak, and adds a new Unix
makefile, ux-gcc-x.mak, for using gcc instead of cc. (The latter doesn't
actually work yet.)

Changes the name of the single built-in font from uglyfont.cp to
ugly10.cp.

Version 1.1 (2/12/89)
===========

Interpreter
-----------

Makes the scanner treat ^Z (ASCII code 26) as whitespace: it erroneously
treated ^R (ASCII code 22, or octal 26) as whitespace.

Makes the token and readline operators, and the syntax for comments,
recognize \r (code 13), \n (code 10), and \r\n as equivalent end-of-line
indicators. The token and readline operators will skip over any of these
sequences at the end of a token or line respectively, and a comment will
read through any of these sequences. The other file operators (read,
write, readstring, writestring) do nothing special with these characters.

Changes the debug switch name from -D to -Z. Adds a -D switch for
defining names in systemdict from the command line. Defines -DDEBUG for
printing out debugging information during initialization, and -DNODISPLAY
for suppressing display output.

Corrects a bug that prevented the error machinery from working -- in
version 1.0, errors always dumped the stacks and aborted interpretation.

Corrects a bug that made eq and ne not work for strings.

Makes the atan (arctangent) operator normalize its results according to
the PostScript convention.

Makes the div operator check for zero divisor.

Makes unimplemented operators (resetfile, echo, save, restore, strokepath,
reversepath) truly undefined.

Makes the interactive loop exit gracefully on end-of-file: in version 1.0
this caused an infinite loop.

Implements the status operator.

Corrects a bug that made the 'for' operator deliver garbage values if one
or more of the operands (start, increment, end) was a real.

Corrects a bug that made the arc and arcn operators not pop their operands
from the stack.


Corrects a bug that made the kshow operator crash the interpreter.

Corrects a bug that made the print operator fail on machines that don't
pass structure arguments by simply pushing the contents of the structure.

Adds a new operator, imagecharpath, to convert images to
addcharpath-compatible outlines.

Changes alloc and alloc_free to use char * rather than byte *, and
alloc_free to return void rather than int, making them compatible with the
library's expectations and with malloc/free.

Explicitly casts all expressions of the form (ptr1 - ptr2) used as
procedure arguments to unsigned, to handle an incompatibility between
Turbo C versions 1.5 and 2.0.

Changes some of the internal conventions for operators: operators that
push on the operand stack must check for overflow explicitly, and
operators that modify the execution stack must return a special code.
(See oper.h for details.)

Initialization (ghost.ps, gfonts.ps)
--------------

Modifies ghost.ps and gfonts.ps so they print debugging information only
if the name DEBUG is defined. (Presumably the user will set this from the
command line with -DDEBUG.)

Changes ghost.ps so it initializes the nominal screen size to 640 x 350 on
MS-DOS systems as before, but to 612 x 792 on Unix systems, which is an
8.5" x 11" page at 72 pixels per inch.

Library
-------

Corrects a bug that made the fill and eofill operators (gs_fill and
gs_eofill) not perform a newpath afterward.

Corrects the bug that made thin, nearly horizontal lines display wrong (as
a series of disconnected dots) in the MS-DOS implementation.

Fixes a bug in the EGA driver that often made it fill rectangular regions
with black around information being displayed in white.

Completely changes the internal representation of outline fonts, and
changes btoi.ps (a Ghostscript language program for converting bitmaps to
outlines) to use a new library call, gs_imagecharpath.

Changes the extension for outline font files from .gf to .cp.

Adds a new debugging switch, q, that traces all rectangle fill operations.

Adds a new debugging switch, v, that traces all device-level output calls.

Explicitly casts pointer differences passed as procedure arguments, as in
the interpreter.

Makes stringwidth work if there is no current point. In version 1.0, this
gave a nocurrentpoint error.

Usage procedures
----------------

Changes the name of the 'read me' file from READ.ME to README.

Removes a bogus line (invoking the 'mcopy' utility) from the makefile.

Splits up the makefile into a generic part (ghost.mak) and
platform-specific parts (dos-ega.mak, unix-x11.mak). The latter are what
is actually executed.

Puts the definitions of the DEBUG and gs_DEBUG compilation flags into the
makefile instead of in ghost.h and gx.h respectively.

Changes the names of the documentation files to be a little less cryptic.
Changes all the file names to lower-case in the documentation. Adds
installation information to make.doc.

Changes all function definitions (but not prototype declarations) to ANSI
syntax, and adds a preprocessing step (ansi2knr) to convert them to K&R
syntax on Unix systems.

Changes the normal MS-DOS link configuration to not assume the presence of
an 80x87 coprocessor, and describes how to increase performance if a
coprocessor is present.

Changes the names of all the interpreter .c files, except stream.c, to
begin with 'i'.

Version 1.0 (8/11/88)
===========

First version released to the public.