roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (09/20/88)
mh@wlbr.eaton.com.UUCP (Mike Hoegeman) writes: > Here's all you have to do. > > newshost % psh > newshost % executive > Welcome to NeWS 1.1 > erasepage 10 10 moveto (Hello world!) show > : > ...etc... > : > Yeah, well, that's sort of my point. I just tried doing exactly that. What I got was the background pattern blanking out. The window in which I ran the psh happened to be in the lower-left corner of my screen, so I figured maybe the "Hellow world!" was hiding underneath it. When I dragged it away, instead of finding the message, I got the grey background redrawn wherever I dragged the window from. Feeding that line to psh again did indeed give me the message down in the lower-left corner of the screen. Hardly intuitive, and even with this simplest of examples, you're already having to worry about things like windows. Of course, you might simply use psview instead of psh, but that has it's own subtle non-PostScript-isms like not having to put a showpage on the end, and not dealing very well with rotated or scaled fonts. Well, OK, maybe that's not so bad. Let's see what happens when I feed that same bit of PostScript to a LaserWriter: %%[ Error: invalidaccess; OffendingCommand: show ]%% %%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%% Hmm, that's odd. Of course, the reason is that I had no current font set. This didn't bother NeWS because NeWS seems to have a default current font already set when you fire up a psh. I still maintain that NeWS is different enough from PostScript to make in inadvisable to use the former as a tool for learning the latter. -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net "The connector is the network"
toms@NCIFCRF.GOV (09/21/88)
I think that once you get over the initial problems (like having windows over where you are drawing) that the psh environment is perfect for learning PostScript; that is exactly what I did. I needed a jump start from a friend, but after that it was really great to see my results directly. So I vote for using psh under NeWS as a GREAT way to learn pure PostScript; you don't need to know very much NeWSisms at all. Tom Schneider National Cancer Institute Laboratory of Mathematical Biology Frederick, Maryland toms@ncifcrf.gov