Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!bu-cs!husc6!gramian!nowlin
From: nowlin@gramian.harvard.edu (Bill Nowlin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Compact data representations?
Message-ID: <1708@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 27 Apr 89 14:33:50 GMT
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Reply-To: nowlin@gramian.harvard.edu (Bill Nowlin)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Harvard Robotics Lab, Harvard University
Lines: 20

Is PostScript completely ASCII?

I would like to draw many, many lines in PostScript.  I have a C program which
computes the endpoints of the lines, and its a trivial matter to write them
in the middle of a PostScript file that will do what I want.

However, the resulting PostScript file is huge.  Each of my endpoints is
represented by a 3- or 4-digit ASCII string, and so plotting 900 lines can
result in a file of considerable length.  I abbreviated as much as my
knowledge of PostScript permits, and concatenated line segments into longer
lines wherever possible, but all I could really do was cut the size of the
file in half.  I need to reduce it by an order of magnitude.

Here then is my question.

Does PostScript allow the sending and unpacking of packed data arrays?
What's the easiest way to do this?  Examples appreciated...

Bill Nowlin
nowlin@gramian.harvard.edu