larry@csccat.UUCP (Larry Spence) (01/23/90)
I would like to solicit opinions on Display PostScript (DPS) from both
users and non-users. When DPS was first announced, there was a big
flurry of information, news, etc. It seemed like a viable contender.
Lately, however, it looks like NeXT machines (remember?) are the only
thing out there that's actually using DPS in a shipping product. I
recall that DEC was going to adopt DPS, too, but I haven't heard any
more about that for a while. I'm sure Adobe has a long list of vendors
who "have pledged their support," "are developing," etc., but I want
to know if anything is out there that I can buy and evaluate.
I've read the DPS reference materials, so I'm somewhat familiar with
user paths, etc. What I'd like to see is some real-world feedback
from people who are USING the DPS system in a non-trivial fashion.
What's fast? What's slow? What do you like/dislike? How much memory
do you need to display a medium-complexity illustration (e.g., the
"Golfer" demo) with user paths? I saw a demo of a drawing app on the
NeXT machine at Seybold that was sloooooooww... and the excuse was
made that "well, it's running on top of DPS, so that slows it down some."
I've heard that Illustrator is being ported to the NeXT machine, but
it's been a while and nothing has been shipped (that I know of). I would
expect Adobe to get Illustrator running on the NeXT ASAP, in order to
show off DPS the way Mac Illustrator showed off what you could do with
printer PostScript.
At any rate, I just noticed that DPS doesn't seem to be getting much press
anymore, and wondered if some consensus had been reached on its usability,
speed, etc. Also, I read that Phoenix is already working on a DPS clone!
Any info on that?
--
Larry Spence
larry@csccat
...{texbell,texsun,attctc}!csccat!larry