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From: moore@PULSAR.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU (Dale Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: A little PostScript hacking for NeXT screens
Message-ID: <5031@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 19 May 89 21:00:15 GMT
References: <3338@tank.uchicago.edu>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 36

Bounding Box and Floating point numbers.

Scott Deerwester recently sent a message to comp.sys.next,
and comp.lang.postscript.  The message contained a PostScript
program.

A portion of the message is below

>Insert your bitmap (a Whole Big Bunch of hex numbers) at the
>appropriate place. [text deleted]
>
>%!PS-Adobe-1.0
>%%BoundingBox: 0.000 0.000 512.000 480.000
>%

According to the document structuring conventions,
a bounding box is an orderd set of four "integers".

Now, the above numbers certainly look like floating point
numbers.  And we all know that floating point numbers aren't
integers.

I don't mean to pick on Scott Deerwester.  Alot of the PostScript
stuff that comes from Next suffers the same problems.

But I've a couple of utilities that look at such things as 
"%%BoundingBox"  and I wonder if I should reject these things for
not being formatted properly.  If I should accept these
floating point numbers, should I round 'em off or truncate 'em?
See, the spec doesn't really say.

Maybe what we need is a Document Structuring Convention and
Encapsulated PostScript validation utility!  It sure would save
me few heated arguments. (No... My software's not busted yours is!)

Dale Moore
--