Subject: Re: On the Road to version 1.0
From: Bryce Nesbitt (bryce@obviously.com)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2001 - 08:43:07 CST
Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>
> At 08:20 PM 12/20/2001 -0500, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> >WMF may be more popular than EPS, that I grant.
>
> Depends on the market you are targetting ;).
>
> >But in the business world vector
> >drawings are definitely preferred to raster images, especially for
> >printing.
>
> Of course!
>
> >And CMYK vs. ICC cs. RGBA is meaningless on a monochrome laser. Resolution
> >is where it's at.
>
> Agreed.
>
> >.EPS has the rather strong advantage of translating in vector format
> >all the way to the printer.
>
> ONLY if you have a Postscript printer! If you have a raster, PCL
> or other type of printer, then EPS ends up getting rasterized early on.
True, but it gets rasterized at printer resolution, as opposed to
screen resolution. You get no bitmap scaling artifacts.
For Linux I trust Ghostscript's rasterizer more than ImageMagic's (And
Ghostscript rasterizes the rest of the page, so why not?).
> >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.
>
> ONLY if you have a Postscript printer...
Or if your work eventually gets sent to a typesetter.
Industry convention with other WP's is that EPS import makes no attempt
to "tame" the EPS. The WP just acts as a passthru. When I use Microsoft
Publisher, for example, and output to a PCL printer, I get a grainy bitmap.
The inherent limitation, and benefit, of EPS is that it's a way to pass
PostScript to the lowest possible printing layer. This is good.
-Bryce
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