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From: npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: troff postprocessors for ISO 8859 characters
Keywords: dwb, postscript
Message-ID: <1990Dec28.195703.2749@cbnewsl.att.com>
Date: 28 Dec 90 19:57:03 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 23


The original DWB's (1.0 and 2.0) supported a variety of
printers: default was C/A/T, others were daisy, Imagen,
Xerox, etc.  In 3.1 we feature PostScript but also provide
Imagen and HP LaserJet support.
Our plan would be to provide support for the European standard
(ISO 8859-1) character set only with the PostScript postprocessor,
dpost.  The reason is that the HP LaserJet requires host-resident
fonts, in bitmap form, for every point size. The size of the
font support for the LaserJet is already several megabytes,
and the additional characters would add considerably. I'm not
sure where we'd get the bitmaps from, either.
PostScript already provides most if not all of the additional
characters-- they are already in the printer, we only have to
generate the name or position of the character in dpost.
So, my question is, have the Europeans settled on PostScript as
a standard for printers, or is there something else we should
be supporting?
(Special note to HP LaserJet owners: as you may already know,
for US $700 you can add a PostScript cartridge to your LaserJet II.
In addition to the added flexibility of PostScript you will
probably recover your investment with the disk space you save
when you rm the LaserJet bitmaps!)