Subject: Re: XP PS
From: Michael D. Crawford (crawford@goingware.com)
Date: Thu Aug 10 2000 - 05:38:17 CDT
Cross-platform postscript would be extraordinarily valuable for a number
of reasons:
- publishing to imagesetters
- publishing to PDF documents
- the postscript generated on the BeOS blows donkey dinks. It a
humongous postscript file of a bitmap, more suitable for printing on an
inkjet printer than a laser printer. Basically they punted when they
wrote the PS printer driver
- you'd be able to modify the PS files, or use them as input to PS
editing programs, to make encapsulated postscript files out of them
Yes, some platforms have the ability to generate postscript from the
printer driver, but with the BeOS being an extreme example, I'm sure any
platform will definitely demonstrate that you get better postscript if
you print directly to postscript then transport it to your postscript
device without going through a printer driver.
Even on the Mac there is the laserwriter utility so someone who
preferred this route (I've done it) can print to postscript from AbiWord
and submit it to the printer.
It also opens up the possibility of, ah, I forget what it's called but
there's a high-end publishing protocol where you put screen-resolution
graphic proxies in your document and print to postscript, then high-res
images that may be hundreds of megabytes are inserted into place at the
print spooler for final output. Publishers and service bureaus
routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars for this functionality -
imagine they could publish to it with AbiWord!
Also, on the Mac at least, there's a very simple way to stream
postscript directly to the printer from a program. You read in a
resource with a certain ID from the printer driver resource file and the
first few bytes in the resource header are a jump table so you just call
into the resource as subroutines with certain offsets. It's very easy,
I could write code to do this for you on the Mac in a few hours. My
program Working Watermarker is a virus-like hack on this resource.
Mike Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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