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From: spworley@athena.mit.edu (Spaceman Spiff)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: Has Post v1.4 been released yet?
Message-ID: <1991Mar14.043405.13433@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 91 04:34:05 GMT
References: <47356@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1991Mar13.123938.7090@sarah.albany.edu>
Sender: spworley@athena.mit.edu
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 35


I downloaded and ran Post 1.5 on my 3000. Have to admit the program is 
pretty slick- its interface is ideal for the Amiga, and you have nice
printer/iff/screen options. There are PS fonts out there, so that's 
not a problem. This is the kind of functionality I'd like to have in
any program I'd make. 

Of course, I think it's output quality is completely unusable. The first
thing I tried was a "fountain", a patch that gradually fades from 
gray=0 to gray=1 as it moves left to right. What I got was trash- half of
the box was solid black, half of the box was a perfect latticework 50% gray.
Apparently Post maps gray=0 to white, 0<gray<=.5 to 50% gray, and the rest
black. No intermediate halftone shades. Sheesh! There's little point in
using this program unless you are doing solid blacks. 

Hoping this only happened on the screen display, I made an IFF. Same problem.
I printed it on my dot matrix printer. Same thing. I sent the raw file to a
postscript printer (not using Post at all) --> beautiful.

I realize I am being very harsh. There is a chance that I was doing
something wrong or I had a bum copy (although my 1.3 version did it too!)
and I'm more than willing to revoke my criticism if Post CAN be coaxed into
doing grays. (In fact, I'll write some more praise on its interface!)
Until a new version comes out (or someone tells me "you bonehead! Switch
this on!") I'm going to have to live without screen-display PS on my Amiga.
The current version of Post (1.5) is just unusable.

In summary, a great program is made nearly useless by the non-implementation
of an essential PostScript feature.

-Steve

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Steve Worley                                           spworley@athena.mit.edu
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