
The Remote Imaging Protocol and its associated Remote Imaging Protocol Script language, RIP''scrip'', is a
graphics language that provides a system for sending
vector graphics over low-bandwidth links, notably
modems. It was originally created by Jeff Reeder, Jim Bergman, and Mark Hayton of TeleGrafix Communications in
Huntington Beach, California
Huntington Beach is a seaside city in Orange County, California, Orange County in Southern California, located southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. The city is named after American businessman Henry E. Huntington. The population was 198,711 duri ...
to enhance
bulletin board system
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...
s and other applications.
RIPscrip was introduced in 1992 and consisted of
ASCII-text descriptions of vector-drawn graphics and images, along with facilities to create
menus and clickable buttons. These were sent from the BBS instead of the more common
ANSI color-coded text-mode screens, and were interpreted on the user's end by a RIP-enabled
terminal program such as TeleGrafix's own
RIPTerm
The Remote Imaging Protocol and its associated Remote Imaging Protocol Script language, RIP''scrip'', is a graphics language that provides a system for sending vector graphics over low-bandwidth links, notably modems. It was originally created b ...
. Lines of text appeared in one display, graphics in another. RIPscrip could not be used as the basis for a complete
GUI, as it included no text editing system.
RIPscript 1.5x was a text based wrapper around the
Borland Graphics Interface
The Borland Graphics Interface, also known as BGI, was a graphics library bundled with several Borland compilers for the DOS operating systems since 1987. BGI was also used to provide graphics for many other Borland products including the Quattro P ...
(BGI). Drawing primitives all relied on the BGI, fonts were limited to those provided by the BGI (*.CHR). RIPscrip icon (.ICN) file format was that of the BGI getImage() and putImage() functions. The choice to include the BGI flood fill function was considered by many to be a mistake, as third-party implementations of the RIPscip protocol often failed to implement Bezier curves the same way Telegrafix had, thus leading to the flood fill leaking out of the intended object and filling the entire screen. Telegrafix never published their Bezier algorithm or a complete RIPscrip specification, thus ensuring developers wishing to implement RIPscrip were forced to purchase Telegrafix's expensive developers kit, containing pre-compiled BGI wrapper DLLs.
Early versions of RIPscrip were tightly tied to the EGA 640×350
EGA
Ega or EGA may refer to:
Military
* East German Army, the common western name for the National People's Army
* Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, the emblem of the United States Marine Corps
People
* Aega (mayor of the palace), 7th-century noble of Neus ...
standard and had a decidedly
MS-DOS-like feel. Later versions provided
resolution independence (after a fashion), expanded color palettes, and the ability to work over
telnet for Internet access. By this time public access to the
World Wide Web caused interest in
bulletin board system
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as ...
s to rapidly decline, resulting in the eventual end of RIPscrip development and the company. Although RIPscrip 2.0 was released and 3.0 was planned, the most common version of RIPscrip in actual use was the 1.5x series.
Vector image standards which are present on the
World Wide Web today that draw some similarities include
Adobe Flash and
SVG.
Description
RIPscrip is a simple
page description language similar in concept to
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
or
HPGL. Graphics output is described in a series of text instructions, which have been heavily optimized in RIPscrip to be as short as possible in order to save transmission time.:
[This section is adapted from the RIPscrip 1.54 documentation, foun]
here
/ref>
A RIPscrip aware terminal watches for lines beginning with a special RIPscrip escape character
In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character (computing), character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharac ...
and interprets the following instructions, passing along non-escaped lines to the text output screen. RIPscrip used separate text and graphics displays, one each, and although it could draw text into the graphics screen, the speed of doing so was such that it was not useful for general text output or editing. Generally, a system using RIPscrip would use the graphics screen for presenting menus, with conventional editing and input taking place in the text screen. RIPscrip would not normally be used to build a conventional GUI with multiple windows or mouse-driven text editing, for instance.
The RIPscrip escape character was the exclamation mark, !
. RIPscrip commands were always preceded by the vertical bar, ,
, followed by a single-letter command. Later versions optionally inserted digits between the vertical bar and command letter, indicating what version of RIPscrip was needed to interpret that command, allowing older terminals to quickly filter out non-supported features. A common command one would find in a RIPscrip file would be to set the size and position of the text output window, typically something like !, w00001B0M10
, with the "w" command for "window", followed by a series of numbers indicating its location and size.
RIPscrip commands could be stacked together on a single line for compactness. For instance, !, v00001B0M10, E, c02, Thello world
sets up the standard graphics viewport output window with v
, erases any existing image with E
(redundant as the window was just reset), sets the color to green with c
, and then draws text with T
. More complex drawings would normally be built out of a series of stacked commands, each one representing some part of the overall drawing to be created, breaking it into logical groups.
In addition to basic graphics like lines and circles, RIPscrip also included commands for interactive objects, notably buttons. The U
command drew a button into the display at a specified location with and optional icon, hot key, and label. When the button was pressed with the mouse or hot key, the last parameter, the ''host command'' string, was sent back to the server. In this way the RIPscrip author could produce graphical menus for commands in the system, perhaps one that lists all the available forums by sending the text "FPA" for "forums, public, all". These strings would be different for every host software, and also tend to be somewhat different from system to system.
See also
* ANSI escape code
* BBS door
* Interpreted language
* NAPLPS
Notes
References
*
External links
BBS Documentary Library's page on RIP
including sample artwork, specifications and whitepapers.
RIP graphics article
with sample RIP and ANSI graphics, plus a RIP viewer which can run in a command window on Win2K and WinXP: Wayne Thomas' 1994 FreeView 1.1 (freeware).
PabloDraw
multi-user RIP''scrip'' viewer and editor for Windows, OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
and Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
{{BBS
Bulletin board systems
Computer-related introductions in 1993
Graphics standards