Subject: Re: On the Road to version 1.0
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2001 - 09:39:34 CST
At 09:43 AM 12/21/2001 -0500, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> > 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.
And a properly written word processor would re-rasterize the
vector data at printer resolution before printing. Currently, you are
right, we don't do that. BUT it wouldn't be too difficult to change the IM
plugin to ask for rasterization at printer resolution always! It would
mean larger .abw files since the images stored therein would be larger -
but you would get better quality.
>For Linux I trust Ghostscript's rasterizer more than ImageMagic's (And
>Ghostscript rasterizes the rest of the page, so why not?).
IM uses GS for PS/EPS/PDF rasterization.
Rest of what page?
>Industry convention with other WP's is that EPS import makes no attempt
>to "tame" the EPS. The WP just acts as a passthru.
Agreed. And at some point in the future, Abi should do the same.
>When I use Microsoft
>Publisher, for example, and output to a PCL printer, I get a grainy bitmap.
That's because Publisher sucks ;). Word does a better job...
>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.
Depends on the OS and WP in question, since each one handles this
type of thing differently.
But in general, keeping things vector (be it EPS, PDF or SVG)
until the last minute is definitely the way to go!
Leonard
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