Potential improvements

If you are extensively using QSIM on the PC, it might be worthwhile to invest a little bit of time in one of the following improvements. Due to time restrictions we have been unable to pursue these improvements, however, we would gladly support your efforts.

Porting POS to Windows 95

- This is probably about a weeks worth of work if you are experienced with LISP and also with the PC. Basically, there are a set of ``atomic'' functions that write create a display and generate certain graphical structures (like boxes, lines, text, etc) that need to be written for the PC. This is much more work than the other potential improvements discussed below.

Modify the form of the postscript file so that you can freely navigate the file.

As mentioned above, you currently are unable to freely navigate the postscript file. This is because there are a few page markers that are missing. I spent a little bit of time trying to figure this out and was unable to. However, I suspect that it is fairly simple and with a good postscript book and our help this would probably only require about 1 days work or less.

Automatically fork a ghostview process

- It would also be possible to have lisp automatically fork a ghostview process for each plot that it displays. To do this, it would open a file, write to it, close the file and then fork the ghostview process. It would do this for each plot thus providing the same level of interactivity provided with an X-windows environment.

Allow viewing of the file while qsim-display is still writing to it.

- Currently, ghostview will not display any portion of the file while the Lisp process has the file open. I do not know if this is possible, but it would be nice if ghostview could display the portion of the file that has been written while the Lisp process still maintained the file as open. This would eliminate the need to leave qsim-display prior to viewing the results.

Please contact us if you make any improvements or encounter any problems.