Subject: Re: On the Road to version 1.0
From: Bryce Nesbitt (bryce@obviously.com)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2001 - 07:59:05 CST
Martin Sevior wrote:
>
> On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> >
> > But in the business world vector
> > drawings are definitely preferred to raster images, especially for
> > printing. There is no way you'll get me to put a raster version of
> > the logo for any of the companies I work for on paper. No way I'll
> > rasterize a vector based map, a barcode or any such vecor drawing.
> >
> > And CMYK vs. ICC cs. RGBA is meaningless on a monochrome laser. Resolution
> > is where it's at.
> >
> > .EPS has the rather strong advantage of translating in vector format
> > all the way to the printer. It's also just about the simplest possible
> > import format to deal with. The WP must select the frame size and
> > position, that's it. The postscript just gets translated and shipped
> > on out. No scaling, no preview, no nothin' needed. It's all the printer's
> > problem.
> >
>
> Actually this is quite a powerful argument, except for actually drawing it
> on the screen, it would be very easy for the unix side of things.
Very easy.
Note that most WP's don't even bother drawing on the screen,
they just give you a blank frame to position & resize. Or they
give you the preview bitmap. Not impressive, actually.
Given the existance of ImageMagic, you could do a cool preview.
Use ImageMagic to preview the image on screen, but actually keep
it internally as EPS, and export it as PostScript.
Keeping the EPS internally means you're not damaging or degrading
the source. And the bitmaps are then just temporary.
The EPS spec is at:
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5002.EPSF_Spec.pdf
> At some
> stage will need code to convert between different vector formats. there is
> a nice little unix utility, pstoedit, which converts postscript to various
> vector formats.
>
> pstoedit is GPL'd software although I think the SVG output is generated by
> a shareware plugin. The SVG plugin may be GPL'd of course. Legally it
> should be if it is linked to pstoedit.
>
> Anyway check it out at: http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit
>
> It would make a cool little plugin one day :-)
>
> BTW since we don't have a working SVG implementation I think this will
> have to wait until post 1.0.
>
> Cheers
>
> Martin
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