GILT the Postscript editor
==========================

GILT is dead, long live GILT.
As I write this I think the concept of a highly visual postscript 
editor is a dead end.
There are multiple reasons for this.

1. Complete parsing postscript is not possible, but even the very
   highly sophisticated version I did create is not fast and 
   powerfull enough to be really usefull.
   So my version could not look into functions. 

2. Because Postscript is so powerfull it is to slow to work with.
   You have to redraw the whole picture if you change one 
   character in your picture because this one character might influence
   the whole.
   I think this will change in the future, but today a redraw tooks 
   one to 20 seconds, which is to much for a continuous workflow.

3. Postscript is to difficult for a normal user.
   
Because of this reasons the old java GILT is dead.

But...
there are some things we (speak I) can rescue and use for a new 
project.
The postscript libraries are much to useful to be lost so stay tuned
for the new GILT.


-------------------- >8 ------ >8 ---- >8 ---- >8 ---- >8 ------------

  Following is the old description of GILT

Gilt is a new kind of drawing program. It allows you to produce 
highest quality vector pictures.

For further information look at http://sol.spaceports.com/~engels/programming/unix/gilt/index.html

To install try to run the makefile. 
Because this is a early development version there is no advanced compilation
and installation scheme. 
Maybe I change to jmake in a further version.



THOUGHTS
=======

Some thoughts about the future of the user interface.

Never a perfect fast interpretation.
  There will never be a perfect representation with points to drag and
  so on in Gilt.
  Why? Because it is impossible to show a computed point AND to allow 
  dragging of this point.
  What we want to do is show and allow dragging of points, angles, 
  distances and so on where convinient.
  If the point is computed it was never meant to be dragged around and 
  if you can't drag him, why show?


No buffer dependent options. 
  Buffer dependent options are options like zoom, current selected markers
  used units.
  The base of Gilt is that everything is visible and saved within the 
  postscript file. This is not possible with buffer dependent options. 
  As long as there is no really good cause to make them we leave it alone.

Do we need snap to points?
  Maybe. 
  Contra: 
    We could only snap to markers.
    You could copy the coordinates if you want.
    It is not the way GILT should work.
  Pro:
    It is easy to implement.
    We already snap to a grid, why not to a point.