“A core graphics environment for teletext simulations” by Dixon

The development of our graphics environment over the past year has been directed towards demonstrating the concept of broadcast teletext service, where pages of graphics and text are received in the home over existing television channels. We have developed a graphics editor, Radix, which uses an underlying Core graphics package to create teletext-compatible images. Radix is also used to display these images at arbitrary resolutions by scaling the graphics primitives, selecting the corresponding sizes of fonts and bitmaps, and then precisely adjusting the output video signal. The combination of powerful display hardware and a robust set of software tools has allowed us to rapidly prototype potential teletext features, and to provide these accurate simulations of teletext pages at any resolution. While this general graphics environment does impose some inefficiencies in running graphics applications, they are far outweighed by the ability to quickly respond to changing requirements.

1. AT&T Corp. Frame Creation Terminal. Product literature, 1982.
2. Dixon, D. F., Keith, M., Marshall, S. A., and Ripley, G.D. Graphics Programmer’s Manual. RCA Laboratories, April 1983.
3. Draft Proposed American National Standard. Videotex/Teletext Presentation Level Protocol Syntax (North American PLPS). October 1982.
4. EIA Draft Proposal. A General Service Reference Model for Teletex October 1982.
5. Feiner, S., Salesin, D., and Banchoff, T. Dial: A Diagrammatic Animation Language. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 2, 7 (September 1982), 43-54.
6. Feiner, S., Nagy, S., and van Dam, A. An experimental system for creating and presenting interactive graphical documents. ACM Transactions on Graphics Systems 1, 1 (January 1982), 59-77.
7. Foley, J. D., and van Dam, A. Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics. Addison-Wesley, 1982.
8. GSPC. Status report of the Graphics Standards Planning Committee. Computer Graphics 13, 3 (August 1979).
9. Ikonas Graphics Systems. Ikonas RDS-3000 User’s Guide. April 1982.
10. Ikonas Graphics Systems. IDL Reference Manual. May 1982.
11. Kernighan, B. W., and Plauger, P. J.Software Tools. Addison-Wesley, 1976.
12. Ossanna, J. F., Nroff/Troff User’s Manual Computer Science Technical Report 54. Bell Laboratories, April 1977.
13. Pato, J. N., and Nanian, D. B. Simple Graphics Package Users Guide Version SGP2v1. Brown University, September 1982.
14. Truxal, C. Americanizing videotex. IEEE Spectrum 19, 11 (November 1982), 52-56.