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From: ogawa@orion.arc.nasa.gov (Arthur Ogawa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Display Postscript ?!?
Message-ID: <1991Feb10.105115.4172@news.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 10 Feb 91 10:51:15 GMT
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I heard the news that Adobe maintains that they will not post DP to the Mac;
the Mac has ATM.... Meanwhile, TrueType will naturally be previewable on the 
Mac, but TrueImage? No, the Mac doesn't need that; the Mac has QuickDraw.

All this is pure speculation on my part of course. And pessimistic to boot.
But I just don't see Bill, John, John, and Chuck working together for the
benefit of the user too very well lately.

And there are significant technical problems.

One of the dire limitations of QD is its drawing space, limited to 2^16=
65536 pixels. In order to calculate said pixels to the accuracy of a high-end
imagesetter (ca. 3000 dpi), we're talking printing at 2.5% (not available
presently) and a page size of only 20 inches square. If, on the other hand, 
you work at 100%,  you're dealing with 72dpi resolution, inadequate for fine 
typography (my field). This is why, of course, all those DTP apps either
klootch their way around the Mac Print Manager with PICT comments (the comments
are PostScript code, executed in lieu of the QD code when a PS printer has been
chosen), or provide their own, incompatible software like PageMaker does.

One of the most dire limitations of the Mac Print Manager is md, more
commonly known as Laser Prep. The Macintosh Dictionary (or md) has the
job of interfacing the PostScript generated by the LaserWriter driver
to the PostScript interpreter. It is presumably this dialect of PS
that any DP would have to deal with. And, to tell the truth, md has a
well-acknowledged reputation among PS programmers as simultaneously
the most widely used bit of PS code and the most poorly written. A
possibly apocryphal story has it that the guy at Apple who wrote it
has permanent job security---nobody else can touch the code without
breaking it.

As so often happens, technical problems sprout up alongside political ones.
And they feed on each other and both get bigger.
In order for Apple to support DP, they would have to abandon their 
current posture that QD is their sole imaging model for screen and print,
they would have to allow a more powerful and accurate imaging model (PS)
to co-exist with theirs, and they would have to clean up md. 
Likewise, Adobe would have to get over thier snit (the rest of the way)
and bestow on the lowly Macintosh users that which they have bestowed on 
users of horsepower (read lucrative) products like NeXT, IBM RISC, Sun, 
Silicon Graphics, HP, etc, etc. There may be a more poetic, hyperbolic way 
of stating the point, but this just isn't going to happen anytime soon.


But if they did, they should take care of two glaring omissions in the
current implementation:

1. Apple should make it so that any file printed to disk (ie, command-F)
   would be an encapsulated PostScript file, suitable for placement in 
   another document. Or they should provide a Chooser-level driver for this 
   purpose.

2. Adobe should provide a better program than DrawOver---one that will
   work with any any PICT, not just the feeble few that Adobe picks.
   Or, more better yet, provide a Chooser-level driver that will allow 
   users to print from their application (whatever it may be) to a file
   that is openable by Adobe Illustrator, kind of an extension to (1).

Please, flames to me, not the net.