OT (sort of): opinions on color laser printers for OSX

[Henry McGilton]

On May 4, 2007, at 6:24 PM, Ashley Aitken wrote:

>
> On 04/05/2007, at 11:12 PM, Henry McGilton wrote:
>
>> Well, yes, I am aware of that.    But as I said before, it's
>> fine as long as it works . . .    Somewhere (I have to hunt)
>> I have PostScript documents that display okay in MacGhostView,
>> but which Preview declines to convert.    I will try to repeat
>> the experiment on the latest Preview and see if there are any
>> informative messages . . .
>
> Of course, PDF uses the display model of Postscript but does not  
> have the programming aspects (of Postscript).

Yes, no argument there at all.    PostScript was largely procedural;
PDF is mainly declarative (and I like declarative).    One could  
argue that PDF
has eliminated an enormous class of potential programming errors
precisely because it is declarative.

> I don't believe Preview can handle Postscript files that utilise  
> the programming aspects in particular ways.  So there will be some  
> Postscript files (usually hand written) that cannot be successfully  
> converted to PDF.

Agreed.    One of PostScript's greatest strengths was its
extensibility via its procedural abilities.    In retrospect,
that turned out to be a huge liability as well --- every
application developer ended up inventing a new programming
language.    Just look at the grodiness of Illustrator's
prologues.    And then look at Freehand's prologues.    And
then look at Quark's prologues.    They're all doing essentially
the same thing, but with mutually incomprehensible languages.

Much of the PostScript I have created *is* hand crafted.    See
'PostScript By Example' for 750+ hand crafted pictures
to illustrate the effects obtained from specific PostScript code.
But, 99 percent of my hand crafted PostScript is straightforward
very simple code with no explorations into the dark corners of
the PostScript dungeons and minimal use of programming aspects.

Without wishing to flog this particular horse any more, pretty
much all of that hand crafted PostScript displayed fine with
YAP and Preview on NextStep, displayed fine with GhostView/GhostScript
on a (shudder) PC, and displays fine on MacGhostView/GhostScript
on our current wonderful OS X.

Today's Preview seems to choke on some fairly simple PostScript
stuff, and I will try to understand why.    As time goes by, the
issue starts to fade (so to speak) anyway.

     Cheers,
         ........  Henry


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   Henry McGilton, Boulevardier |    Trilithon Software
    Objective-C/Java Composer   |     Seroia Research
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   mailto:henry at trilithon.com   |   http://www.trilithon.com
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