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From: uad1077@dircon.co.uk (Ian Kemmish)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: other page description languages
Message-ID: <1991May25.125928.11342@dircon.co.uk>
Date: 25 May 91 12:59:28 GMT
References: <1538@h.cs.wvu.wvnet.edu> <1991May24.044839.9063@chinacat.unicom.com> <603@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM>
Organization: The Direct Connection, UK
Lines: 33


I actually have some Interpress documentation sitting behind my
sofa, in my computer antiques collection.  It embodied some of the
key ideas of PS, but some of the aims were (I think) different.
All the transformation stuff was there.  Fonts were represented
as vectors of small procedure.  The path and stroke construction
operators were sort-of familiar, but they didn't cope with
curved lines.  Color was handled differently, and sort-of allowed
different colour spaces, but not in the same way as Level 2 PS.
It did support the stencil-paint metaphor, plus sampled images.

Where it was really different to PS was in that it was part of an overall
document output system.  Different printers were supposed to support
different levels of the language, and the document creator could
(I think) specify which features were required and which were optimal
(Thus, unlike PS, it could support quite dumb matrix printers at
a pinch).  I remember once seeing some articles by adherents of
both systems poitning out that Interpess wasn't flexible enough,
and that PS didn't addres ``system-y'' issues in the wider printing
environment.  Sin ce I never was an INterpress system in operation,
I don't quite appreciate just what these issues were.

Oh, yes, and the language encoing was stright bytecodes.  There was
no ASCII syntax as PS has (other than that used to explain programs
in the manual - a bit like Adobe's Type 1 encoding).

Hope this provides a little illumination.

-- 
Ian D. Kemmish                    Tel. +44 767 601 361
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