phil@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre) (07/31/87)
ambar@athena.mit.edu (Jean Marie Diaz) says: > Our LPS-40 will crank out 40 pages per minutes, after a short pause (~30 > seconds) to download the TeX fonts. That sounds sufficiently practical > to me... Sure, an LPS-40 isn't cheap (yet), but it isn't the distant > future, either, it's right here and now... This is good to see. My only experiences with postscript engines have been bad ones: especially the first demo I saw which was a LaserWriter driven by a Macintosh. It was abysmal. As I told someone else who responded to my previous message with mail: I have never said that PostScript should be abandoned! But I do not want everyone to lapse into complacency thinking that they have reached utopia in printer-language-land. There is most definitely room for improvement, and there are several very good and solid reasons NOT to use PostScript. For those who do not mind the poor performance and who need the versatility, it is certainly the best game in town. Most of what you do on your PostScript printer can be done on an Imagen---the only difference is the amount of effort (usually much more for the Imagen, and in some cases impractically high). The difference is very much like that of an HLL and assembly language. But please remember that PostScript is one of the very first printer HLL's to come out. There is still room for improvement. But it is an excellent starting place. I'd like to do all my programming in Lisp. But it's too much of a resource hog to make that practical. And that is NOT due to poor implementations---it is the very nature of the language. Well....I guess it could be argued that the primary fault lies with an ill-suited architecture. Maybe if we put a PostScript interpreter in microcode..... I still see two serious deficiencies: one with the language PostScript and one with its assorted implementations. First, there is the problem that Pierre MacKay so eloquently stated: it is almost impossible for other font designing programs (such as Metafont) to interface well with PostScript. Second, I have yet to see a PostScript printer attached directly to an Ethernet (except for DEC's DECNet version, which is only useful on a network of VMS/Ultrix Vaxes). If a PostScript printer is truly meant to further the ideals of distributed computing, then it should be attachable to the most commonly used local area network. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.edu>