For printing purposes, I needed to re-render one of my sketches in high-resolution. I've searched for ways to do this, but the only one I found was overly complicated and required me to re-write my whole script (for the purposes of tile-by-tile rendering).

That was not what I wanted - I wanted a simple way to switch between high-res and normal rendering, without a need to rewrite anything in the actual code.

After bit more research I come with a hack. It allows me, by appending it's code at the beginning of any script (which produces its result dynamically depending on width/height properties), to render the result in any resolution*.

* - Up to the java memory limit. Last time I checked, it was about 1.2 GB, even when machine I'm using has much more than that.

I have used this only twice, so I'm not aware about any other limitations, or side effects of this technique.

Finally, example script:

1. int sx = 5000;
   int sy = 5000;
   
   /* THE HACK */
   g = createGraphics(sx,sy,JAVA2D);
   this.height = sy;
   this.width = sx;
   g.beginDraw();
   /* THE HACK end */
   
   /* Example sketch start */
   color c1 = #AFA786;
   color c2 = #000000;
   
   for (int y=0; y<=height; y++) {
     stroke(lerpColor(c1,c2,float(y)/height));
     line(0,y,width,y);
   }
   
   stroke(#FFFFFF);
   fill(#BBBBBB);
   ellipse(width/2, height/2, width/2, height/2);
   line(0, 0, width, height);
   /* Example sketch end */
   
   g.endDraw(); /* THE HACK tail */
   
   save("result.png");
   

This script renders 5000x5000 pixels image (partially visible on the screen) and saves it into the file, while using example sketch with basic, regular, unmodified syntax.

My questions are:
- Is there a non-hackish, 'proper' yet still simple way to do this?
- Are there any obvious disadvantages to this solution?