Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!bbn!lawrence
From: lawrence@bbn.COM (Gabriel Lawrence)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: IDEA! - A Text And Graphics Formatter WRITTEN IN POSTSCRIPT
Message-ID: <6686@ccv.bbn.COM>
Date: 8 Feb 88 21:30:38 GMT
References: <8802060615.AA20361@M66-080-5.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: lawrence@ccv.bbn.com.BBN.COM (Gabriel Lawrence)
Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 28

In article <8802060615.AA20361@M66-080-5.MIT.EDU> mbparker@ATHENA.MIT.EDU writes:
>
>I've used Scribe, TeX, and LaTeX text formatting packages, all of
>which output to postscript.  But after learning about what a powerful
>and elegant programming language postscript is, I started wondering...
>
>Why not have a text (and even graphics) formatter directly in postscript?!
>...
>Your thoughts, references, and ideas would be greatly appreciated.
>...

I'm a little confused as to precisely what it is you are submitting for
comptemplation.  Your subject heading would indicate that your interest lies
in harnessing the power of PostScript as a programming language.  This is   
a viable/interesting idea - so far as I know, the only existing mechanisms for
parsing PostScript are run-time interpreters.  Just don't ask me to support
your code at some future date (as I general rule, I'll only support my own
dialects of Forth and PostScript :-)!  The text of your article then describes
a text/graphic package which manipulate images using PostScript as a native
document description language.  This, is not a new idea.  Two packages which
run on the Mac ("Adobe Illustrator" and "Freehand") use PostScript as both
the final output text and as the screen driver/PostScript previewer.  In
addition, the soon-to-be-released 68030 based PC from NeXT (Steve Jobs' new
company) features PostScript as it's native U*ix display driver.  If I'm
missing the point of your idea, please clarify.

=Gabriel Lawrence=
=BBN Communications=