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GEOS SDK TechDocs| 
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1 Graphics Road Map | 
3 Graphics Architecture
The graphics system is in charge of displaying everything in GEOS. Thus, it is vital that the GEOS graphics system be both powerful and easy to use. Features such as outline font support and WYSIWYG printing, usually afterthoughts on other operating systems, have been incorporated into the GEOS kernel. The graphics system was designed to be state of the art and thus had to achieve several goals:
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Fast Operation
The GEOS graphics system is heavily optimized for common operations on low-end PCs. To allow a windowing system to run on an 8088 machine, it is vital that line drawing, clipping, and other common graphical operations run very quickly. They do.
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Device Independence
Applications are sheltered from the hardware. Coordinate system units are device independent so that all of your drawing commands use real-world measurements. These units are then translated into device coordinates by the kernel.
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Complete Set of Drawing Primitives
The graphics system must be able to draw a wide variety of shapes and objects to meet the needs of the UI and applications. It does.
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Built In Support for Outline Fonts
GEOS includes outline font technology supporting a variety of font formats. Outline fonts are text typefaces which are defined by their outline shape rather than by a bitmap representation. Outline fonts can be scaled with no apparent loss of smoothness. GEOS also supports bitmap-based fonts; however the very nature of these fonts makes them non-WYSIWYG.
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Single Imaging Model for Screen and Hardcopy
The graphics system uses the same high level graphics language for screen imaging as for printing. Because the GEOS system creates both screen and printed images through the same language, the screen can display a document just as it will be printed. Except for differences in resolution, what you see is what you get.
| GEOS SDK TechDocs|
| 1 Graphics Road Map | 3 Graphics Architecture