GKS for imaging

By adopting the Graphical Kernel System (GKS), groups who manipulate pixelated images can take advantage of device independent graphics without giving up the functions which have traditionally been hardware dependent. Most of these functions, including image I/O, zoom, pan, lookup table manipulation, and cursor reading, are supported within GKS; several other functions, such as the use of multiple image planes and multiple look up tables, are accomodated by the GKS Escape and the Generalized Drawing Primitive (GDP). Because GKS has powerful inquire capabilities, it's possible to tightly customize applications code to a particular hardware display device. The inquire functions also can be used by an applications program to determine the hardware display size and thus avoid resampling of a pixelated image. GKS thoroughly separates applications programs from device- dependencies; however, device drivers must still be written. The time and effort of writing device drivers can be largely eliminated by using a single programmable device driver, which is tailored to each device by a GRAPHCAP configuration file, in much the same way as TERMCAP is used by Berkeley Unix implementations.