Subject: Re: XP PS
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Wed Aug 09 2000 - 11:51:34 CDT
At 9:35 PM -0700 8/9/00, WJCarpenter wrote:
>Sometime in the last day or two, someone mentioned it would be nice to
>make the PS stuff XP instead of Unix-ish so that PostScript could be
>generated from any platform.
Correct. It's been discussed before, but no one has ever
stepped up to the plate for it.
>Hmmm. Is that worthwhile? I'm not suggesting that the XP goal in
>general is losing it's glamor. I'm just wondering if the conversion
>of this existing piece of code is worth the trouble.
YES, very worthwhile!!
>Unix is lame in the printer department, depending mostly on
>applications to generate the raw printer output. That's mitigated by
>the widespread use of Ghostscript to provide variety outside of apps.
Correct.
>OTOH, MSWindows is pretty rich at printer support. The apps just
>write to some virtual printer thang, and MSWindows provides the
>variety.
Yes, your application makes GDI calls and the printer driver
is then responsible for translating those calls into whatever the
printer works with (PS, PCL, etc.). It means that your application
is now bound by the limitations of GDI for all aspects of it's
drawing (including color space, imaging operator, etc. issues).
> In particular, if you want to generate PS from Abiword on
>MSWindows, it's easy. Just install one of the billions of PS printer
>drivers.
True, and you get pretty crappy Postscript because it's all
starting with GDI. It is also extremely limiting if your end goal is
NOT PS, but instead is PDF. If you generate your own Postscript,
then you can include PDFMarks (an extension for Postscript to include
PDF-centric features that get ignored by printers, but get read by
Distiller/Ghostscript/PStill/etc.) which GREATLY improve the quality
of generated PDF documents.
Leonard
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