[cl-pdf-devel] CMUCL compatibility fixes and new color handling code

[Dmitri Ivanov]

Hello Klaus,

|> Good proposal. Suggest including x11-colors.lisp as an optional
|> feature, i.e. conditionalizing the rest of code by something like
|> #+x11-colors and #-x11-colors.
|
| I'm not entirely sure what the point of conditionalizing that is,
| unless there's some other standard color selection mechanism included
| instead. Keep in mind that my code does not in any way depend on having
| X11 installed, it's completely self-contained, and nobody *forces* you
| to use the keywords or strings if you don't like them. You can always
| directly specify colors, i.e. based on your own mappings.

I consider conditionalizing the only way not to be forced.

| A less invasive approach would be to use the 16 W3C standardized HTML
| colors. Note that the larger set of nonstandard HTML colors supported
| by IE and Netscape/Mozilla appears to be identical to the X11 color
| set.

Is there much need of anything standard here? In contrast to browsers, PDF
does not standardize on symbolic color names.

OTOH, creating PDF files is a kind of private process. Authors are unlikely
to share their typeset-dependent code (except while developing cl-pdf
itself), but the resulting pdfs instead. They are likely to exploit the
color system they get used to within their favorite CL development
environment, e.g. LispWorks CAPI, and not to learn any additional color
database.

IMHO a color system should be provided for those implementations that lack
it (even if the system comes from honorable X11 :-)).
--
Sincerely,
Dmitri Ivanov
lisp.ystok.ru