Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!angel!henry From: henry@angel.Sun.COM (Henry McGilton--Software Products) Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript Subject: PostScript -- Stop Bashing Adobe Keywords: PostScript, Bit Maps, Language Wars Message-ID: <132223@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 24 Feb 90 23:30:19 GMT Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Distribution: na Lines: 105 Well, peoples, the 'PostScript Language and Bitmap Wars' are wearing a little thin. I read this forum because of a desire to obtain technical information about the PostScript Language. Of late I have seen far too much `Adobe Bashing'. I would like to see this forum devoted to the technical aspects of the PostScript language and what you can do with it, rather than the recent spate of `Adobe are a bunch of arrogant people trying to control the world'. Now PostScript, in my opinion, does have its problems. I'm sure that the PostScript we know and love today is not the last word. There will probably be a PostScript-2001. By which time the laser-holographic readouts on your programmable toaster will be driven by a 10,000 MIPS PostScript interpreter, and so on. What we have today can't possibly be the last word -- it's simply not cast in fused toner. But I see too many postings to this group flaming about what a money-grubbing bunch of despots Adobe are, and what a brain damaged language PostScript is, and so on. To those people, I simply have this advice: if you don't like what Adobe have done, do something better. If you think you have a better page description language, build the damned thing and market it. If you're tired of waiting for 9600 Baud serial interfaces, build yourself a printer with a fibre-optic satellite interface. But otherwise, cease whining. We really need to place in perspective what Adobe have accomplished by creating PostScript. People here in the Bay Area should take a walk around down-town Palo Alto some time. Tally how many corner shops there are full of Macintoshes and LaserWriters, and signs in their windows proclaiming `PostScript Spoken Here'. You don't see shops on street corners claiming `InterPress Spoken Here', or ImPress, or DDL, or . . . Adobe, by the manner in which they marketed PostScript, have CREATED entire new enterprises, that have created thousands of new jobs. Many people have made (lots of) money creating things that revolve around PostScript. Sitting on my shelf here are a collection of software packages that would not today EXIST were it not for PostScript. Each of those packages were created by people who have lucrative enterprises because of PostScript. People who saw a market niche and moved in to fill it, instead of sitting around whining. There are entire magazines devoted to publishing that might not exist if PostScript hadn't come along. Just yesterday I was able to format a troff document on my Sun Workstation, create PostScript using TranScript, move the file over to a Mac disk, take the disk down the street to a PostScript service bureau, and print very nice thank you pages on a Varityper 600 dpi laser engine. 1270 or 2540 dpi Linotronic available if I want it. What is now a ho hum exercise was almost impossible five years ago, and out of the question ten years ago. Such service bureaus didn't exist. Ten years ago I went out of my mind trying to get my first UNIX book typeset from a Scribe description. Five years ago I was able to generate camera-ready art for my second book using PostScript laser engines. Ten years ago, getting from troff (or Scribe, or TeX) to a Mergenthaler machine, or an APS-5, or a you name it, was pretty well nigh impossible. You couldn't get to a VT-600 because they didn't even exist. You had to use troff (or Scribe, or TeX), by the way, because the Macintosh didn't exist either. I have a Sun system at home, and I have a PostScript-based LaserWriter hooked up to it. Gathering cobwebs on the floor beside it is a Diablo 630 (remember them?) that was a fantastic machine when I bought it in 1982, for the princely sum of $2,400. Now, I can't give the thing away, even to starving non-profit outfits. For roughly the same price range, you can now get a PostScript laser engine capable of feats that we only dreamed of ten years ago. Right now, I'm working on a new book. Because of PostScript, and the availability of low-cost typesetting or near typesetting, I am in the (either enviable or maybe stupid) position of being able to do my own publishing, from creating the text to generating camera-ready masters that can go straight to the print shop. I can bypass McGraw-Hill and their army of people with the finest typesetting technology of the 1940's. And I can cut three to six months off the schedule for a 300 page book. PostScript is as much a socio-economic phenomenon as it is a technological innovation. Well, I don't always know where I'm going, but it's good to be back. So, let's stop bashing Adobe and get on with doing nifty things with PostScript. To quote Harry Stine, `It's raining soup, grab a bucket'. Let's get back to technical PostScript, shall we? .......... Henry For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.