laser-lovers@uw-beaver (05/24/85)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Cascade> I shall resist the temptation to prove to all of you that I am a better character asassin than Les Earnest. What I'd like to do instead is remind you that this is a forum for the discussion of laser printers, not restaurants, wine, or amateur comedy. Further, 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". Since I know that this statement cannot possibly be true, given that the LaserWriter can produce any character spacing that you like, I tried simultaneously to assert the truth while exploring the motives of someone who would make such an inflammatory statement. Les has succeeded in throwing up a pretty good smoke screen to obscure and distract from this spacing issue. This is the end of the academic year at Stanford, and I do have other things to do with my time than flame on Laser-lovers. When I get the time, perhaps in the next few weeks, I will put together an explanation of what the quantitative issues are in laser printer spacing, and why statements like "the spacing on printer X is wrong" are often vacuous, and why "blind tastings" have got to be done with a great deal of care. A week ago I believed that Les was just being hostile about this issue; I attributed his hostility to the fact that he is a major stockholder in a company that perhaps stands to lose business if it ends up that I am right and he is wrong. I now realize that Les really doesn't understand the character spacing issues, and that he is just saying what he thinks is right (as, of course, am I). Any system that offers a lot of flexibility has got to have "options", or means of controlling what it does. Any system that has "options" must have "default options". If one has never used a system that offers any flexibility in these matters, I can see how it could impair his ability to think in terms of the big picture. I was hoping to find time to write the "tour de force" software, namely a conversion program that would take an ImPress file and convert it into a PostScript file that will print with exactly the same appearance as the original Impress file did. This program is possible, though I'm sure that until I actually produce it and show it around, nobody will believe me (since I have given several times the explanation for why it is possible, and nobody has paid any attention). I challenge Les, or anyone else who believes that the Imagen graphics model is superior to the PostScript graphics model, to write the inverse program, namely one that takes a PostScript file and converts it into an ImPress file that will print (on an Imagen printer) the same image that the PostScript file did on a PostScript printer. Brian Reid Stanford