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From: philip@Kermit.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Lasertalk (was Re: Bitmap of PostScript code..)
Message-ID: <1990Feb16.190232.16224@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 16 Feb 90 19:02:32 GMT
References: <2783@bacchus.dec.com> <6722@internal.Apple.COM>
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Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
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In article <2783@bacchus.dec.com>, kent@wsl.dec.com (Christopher A.
Kent) writes:
> The folks at Emerald City have licensed the right to make use of some
> undocumented, unsupported hooks in the LaserWriter PostScript
> interpreter. That's how they get their access to the bitmaps; by paying
> money for the right to use the technology in a way other than putting
> bits on paper, which is what the normal LaserWriter paid for, and ALL
> that he or she paid for.
> 
> Chris Kent	Western Software Laboratory	Digital Equipment Corporation
> kent@decwrl.dec.com	decwrl!kent			(415) 853-6639

Not strictly true. What you get for you money (assuming you've bought a
traditional PS printer) is a general-purpose computer with an embedded
operating system and language interpreter, that happens to be
specialized to controlling a printing engine. If I choose to use it to
do number crunching (assuming I have a lot of spare time), that's up to
me. The one thing it appears I have NOT bought is the right to reuse
fonts built into the PS interpreter in other ways. Appears? I can't say
I recall seeing a copyright notice (?) supplied with any PS printer
making this EXPLICIT. So Adobe has encrypted the fonts in the printer.
So what? They now provide software to render the same fonts as bit maps
on other devices, such as Macintosh screens (Adobe Type Manager).

A Font Foundry? I'm not so sure about this. You could print out
characters in a dozen sizes and scan them in if all you needed to
implement a font was a bitmapped version.

The point we are gettng to is this: people need to convert PS to
bitmaps. A PS printer can already do this. It's not the fastest way of
doing it, but it ought to be a reasonably simple hack to upload a bitmap
from the printer (as LaserTalk does), compared with writing a whole PS
interpreter. So what is the REAL reason Adobe doesn't want us to do this?

Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu