Patterns

• The new pattern color space provides the ability to establish a pattern as the current color. Subsequent use of operators such as fill, stroke, and show apply ``paint'' that is produced by replicating (or tiling) a small graphical figure called a pattern cell at fixed intervals in x and y to cover the areas to be painted. The appearance of a pattern cell is defined by a PostScript language procedure, which can include any arbitrary graphics, text, and sampled images. The shape of the pattern cell need not be rectangular, and the spacing of tiles can differ from the size of the pattern cell. Benefits: Enhanced functionality, performance, convenience.
• For efficiency, the representation of the pattern cell may be cached. When cached, the execution of the procedure that defines the pattern need be done only once for the current pattern. The pattern cache is similar to the font cache. Benefits: Performance.
• Multiple colors can be specified in the pattern or the pattern can be used as a mask to paint a color defined in some other color space. Benefits: Enhanced functionality
• For display environments, this feature will allow patterns to be represented in a resolution independent manner. Until now, patterns have typically been represented by arrangements of pixels. This resolution-dependent representation does not work well when trying to image the pattern at a variety of different resolutions.