Note that DPS is now obsolete.
At the time when I started this project, there was no decent rendering interface for X11 other than DPS.
Since then, there has been a large amount of work on a simple and clean X server extension, Xrender, which provides the basis for just such an interface.
Rendering libraries that are being built above Xrender include Xft, a font rendering library built on FreeType; Cairo, a geometry rendering library that provides PostScript-like rendering primitives but with intrinsic support for Porter-Duff compositing (transparency); Pango, a high-level typesetting library.
If your application uses DPS, please consider porting it to the above libraries. See the DPS extension site for more details
Display Postscript (or DPS for short) is a rendering extension for X11. DPS is slightly atypical in that it is based on code mobility, the ability to send executable code from client to server. Thus, a DPS client does not request that a line should be rendered; instead, it uploads code to the server which, when executed, causes a line to be drawn.
This document does not aim at teaching programming with DPS; it is only a summary description of the DPS support code included with X11R6.8. More information about DPS, including a DPS bibliography, is available from the DPS extension site.
Note: Adobe, PostScript and Display PostScript are trademarks of
Adobe Systems Incorporated which may be registered in certain
jurisdictions.
As all X11 extensions, DPS consists of client-side and server-side components. The DPS client side consists of a number of libraries and a number of tools for programming and configuration. The DPS server side may consist either of an X server extension, or of a client-side process known as the ``DPS agent.'' In this latter case, the term ``server-side'' is somewhat misleading.
At the time of writing, only the client side is included with X11R6.8; the server side must be obtained separately. Please see server side later in this document for more information.