Look-up Table Compiler

Until the past few years, vector graphics was the dominant display technology. Numerous graphics subroutine packages, including de-facto and official standard packages such as the GSPC Core, PHIGS, and GKS, have been developed with the primary objective of abstracting the key components of such systems so that application programmers can effectively use them. In just a few years, raster displays have become the dominant display technology. We look at raster displays as providing an extension of the capabilities found in the more traditional vector or stroke-oriented displays. Unfortunately, the development of appropriate raster-oriented abstractions has not yet caught up with raster hardware capabilities. The raster extensions to the Core (GSPC77,GSPC79) and certain aspects of GKS (GKS84) do provide a start at abstracting raster concepts, but provide only very low-level support for three of the hallmarks of many raster displays: pixel matrixes, raster-op, and the look-up table. In 1982, our group developed a conceptual model of raster system architectures (ACQU82), and specified a language for defining operations on pixel matrixes which would be implemented by calculating the contents of a raster display's look-up table such that the effects of the operations would be seen on the display monitor. This present papermore » reports on an implementation of the concepts found in (ACQU84). Because the system generates look-up table contents from a language specification, we call the system the Look-up Table Compiler.« less