Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!kl-cs!mike
From: mike@cs.keele.ac.uk (Michael A. Green)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Bad PostScript
Message-ID: <1170@kl-cs.UUCP>
Date: 23 Nov 89 13:53:58 GMT
References: <12877@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: University of Keele, England
Lines: 45

From article <12877@polya.Stanford.EDU>, by rokicki@polya.Stanford.EDU (Tomas G. Rokicki):
> After seeing yet another sample of *lousy* PostScript generated by an
> application (this one Windows Designer), I'm very upset.  This particular
> application makes *no* effort to comply with any structuring conventions.
> It even generates an unprotected call to `a4'.
> 
> I get numerous bug reports---90% of the distill down to problems with the
> application generating the PostScript.
> 
> In addition, this C program could serve as the basis for an application's
> PostScript importing code, showing things done correctly.
> 
> I'm sick of dealing with Adobe's poorly written and changing structuring
> conventions, and even more so with applications that don't make even an
> effort to comply.  Comments or thoughts?

Good idea!

I was the first person here to get interested in PS (years ago) and as such
am considered the resident 'guru'. One of the nasty side effects of this is
being called upon (constantly) to sort out problems in printing "PostScript"
generated by various programs.

Many/most of our PC programs for word processing/cad/etc and several on
our Sequents/uVaxes/Suns produce so called "PS". It has taken me many hours
of tedious debugging to find the problems with the PS these programs produce.

The most common problem is with tacky/inaccurate/incomplete prolog files,
these are hard to find problems and it is even harder to try and work out
what missing commands are supposed to do.

The worst offenders by far are programs that produce EPS output for loading
into other programs/files. On most of these I give up and suggest a 'phone
call to the distributor to sort it out (I don't have the time any more).

I think that it is about time that a validation suite was provided, it would
certainly sort the real PostScripters from the hacks!

	--Mike

-- 
|Michael A. Green.              |JANET:  mike@uk.ac.keele.cs                |
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