laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/30/85)
From: Les Earnest <LES@SU-AI.ARPA> Dear Brian: I will try one more time to rescue you from your land of fantasies. ** FLAME ALERT ** Please burn BEFORE reading if you are squeamish. ** In your message of 24 May 1985 1335-PDT (Friday) you say: > I'd like to remind you that the way that we got onto this > tangent was that Les, more or less spontaneously, posted to this group > the statement "the character spacing on the Apple LaserWriter is > wrong". There was nothing at all spontaneous about my remark, Brian. If you check the record, you will find that the topic of Laserwriter character spacing problems was introduced by Henry Spencer of the University of Toronto. I simply confirmed what he had seen and reported. Why didn't you try to beat up on Henry? After all, even zoologists must have SOME conflict of interest. Even though I had been aware of the Laserwriter's character spacing problems for some time, I did not bring them up. Not even while you shamelessly hyped Postscript and the Laserwriter via Laser-Lovers for several months. At least some of your messages had technical content. Also, I figured that it would be better for users to discover these things for themselves. In that same period I also read with interest the glowing reviews in the Seybold Reports about Adobe, Apple, Postscript, and the Laserwriter. It was clear how those reports came about, but I knew that it would be bad form to comment on it. In early May, Paul Rubin at Berkeley sent out a message about the Laserwriter remarking that "the intercharacter spacing is uneven and sloppy-looking." To this you responded "Oh no, not again. Do I have to say this again?" [11 May 1985 1805-PDT] and went on to try to brow-beat Mr. Rubin into not believing his eyes. You then claimed that if there there was anything wrong, it was not in the Laserwriter but in some archaic Apple software. A couple of days later [13 May 85 0058 PDT] I stepped up again and encouraged Mr. Rubin to believe his eyes. I also noted that it doesn't matter much where the problem lies: Apple is responsible for the *entire* system. I then offered a theory about how the spacing problem arose. Instead of addressing the technical question, you launched an attack on Imagen, as if that were relevant, saying that they have produced "absolute total ugly disgusting swill for years." [13 May 1985 0843-PDT] I did not bother debating that issue, figuring that the readers could sort it out for themselves. Now again instead of discussing the technical issues, you would like to pretend that that I am the instigator and orchestrator of a profit- motivated attack on your wonderful Laserwriter. Why have you not chastised Martin Ewing of Caltech for mentioning [24 May 85 00:59:08 PDT] that in Apple's Annual Report, printed on the Laserwriter, "occasionally two characters seem to touch when they shouldn't." As was reported earlier to Laser-Lovers (by someone else), not even The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems has been able to ignore this problem; their May 13, 1985 issue says: > We think the biggest problem with much of the output is not the shape > of characters themselves but uneven character spacing. If you would like to debate the question of whether the Seybold organization is a bunch of Imagen lackeys, I am willing. The first time that I saw some reasonably well-spaced output from the Laserwriter, I reported it to Laser-Lovers [17 May 85 1204 PDT]. I did not disclose until later that this print sample came from Imagen. (I have since learned that it was not produced using the Macintosh software.) Tell me, Brian, is it really so important to you that this wonderful toy in which you have invested so much time and money must be perfect in every way? Is it not permissible to discuss the possibility that there might be a minor blemish somewhere? If not, I will leave you alone in Fantasia. Regards, Les Earnest Stanford University (Still an Imagen shareholder)