Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!enea!tut!utacs!av
From: av@utacs.UTA.FI (Arto Viitanen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Question from Ignorant
Keywords: question, no answer
Message-ID: <559@utacs.UTA.FI>
Date: 14 Sep 88 09:30:12 GMT
References: <692@clinet.FI>
Reply-To: av@utacs.UUCP (Arto Viitanen)
Organization: University of Tampere, Dept. of Computer Science, Finland
Lines: 27

In article <692@clinet.FI> toweri@clinet.UUCP (Jukka Lindgren) writes:
>
 A salesman ...
>
>	"If you take for example a letter 'A' (ASCII=65), in postcript
>it is represented by a series of lines that actually are a drawing of
>the letter 'A'."
>But I:
> "there is the beginning of text column (x1,y1) and it ends at (x2,y2)
>  and it contains the following text with following type- and size setting.
>

There are two things called postscript:

1) The programming language.

2) The interpreter.

To a program, letter A is indeed a text. To the interpreter, when
program says to output letter A, the interpreter checks, what font has
been told (by the program) to be the default one, looks for a
procedure associated with ASCII-code 65 in the font (/AA usually),
then looks for fontsize, current output position, direction and so on,
and finally executes the procedure. In the procedure, letter A is
indeed defined as lines (or actually as curves).

Hope this makes you more confused !!