laser-lovers@uw-beaver (03/20/85)
From: imagen!geof@Shasta <These comments are my own, and not necessarily those of my employer> You commented that you'd like to be able to import a document from another site (or take one off backup tape from 3 years ago, which is the other problem) and have it print correctly. Note that neither Interpress, nor Postscript, nor HP laserjet-language, nor PRESS format solve your problem. In typical usage, masters from all these languages reference fonts by name. The implicit lookup context for the font name is the printer, and there is no guarantee that the fonts the document requires are available at the printer when you want to print the document. I expect that this problem is one we won't ever solve, because the licensing organizations for fonts will not allow a binding operation which encapsulates a document with its fonts, for obvious reasons. Both Impress and Postscript theoretically permit this binding, but without the ability to bind in the `best' fonts, there is no reason to bother. If this is true, then the real question is from which format -- that of the printer or that of the formatter -- it is most easy to modify a document to be printed correctly. I argue that this is clearly at the document formatter level, since it is designed specifically to be modifiable, often in exactly this way. The divisional boundaries of the document are visible to it, and it can adjust the pagination of the document as well as the local line or character spacing [no comments about implementing troff in postscript, please]. For example, SCRIBE allows a change of font sets to be made with a one line change to the document. Clearly, you must be a scribe "expert" (or at least a user) to know which line to change. This would also be true if you were given a Postscript or Interpress file and needed to change the fonts it used. I have seen the `excellent' job that a laser printer can do when it has to try and adjust a document to a different font set. I truly believe that the output of any reasonable formatter program, even when using its default substitutions, looks far better. - Geof Cooper