bukys@cs.rochester.edu (03/19/91)
This is a futile plea, I know, but here it is.
Please stamp out bad PostScript generators.
It seems like half of the Postscript files my users pick up off the net
are unprintable.
Sub-pleas:
Don't mark the file conformant if it's not.
How many times have I pasted in a plain "%!" to prevent
my spooler from trying to page-reverse (and hence mangle)
a file that is really non-conformant.
Don't use printer-specific features without testing for
their existence. My most recent specimen here was the
use of "a4".
Don't depend on a being able to do an "exitserver".
Those Macintosh "LaserPrep" files are one of the most
ill-conceived notions around. Do they really save that much
time?
Don't put unnecessary memory allocation inside a loop. I just
ran across this:
{ currentfile 1 string readhexstring pop } image
which allocates a 1-byte string (in this case, 262144 times).
Thank you for listening.john@IASTATE.EDU (Hascall John Paul) (03/19/91)
In article <9103191412.AA27314@stork.cs.rochester.edu>, bukys@cs.rochester.edu writes: > This is a futile plea, I know, but here it is. > > Please stamp out bad PostScript generators. > > It seems like half of the Postscript files my users pick up off the net > are unprintable. Hear! Hear! And many commercial applications are just as bad (almost every ``PostScript'' file I've seen from a MAC application is unprintable on anything but a LaserWriter). Another sub-plea: PLEASE put in NEWLINES at reasonable intervals! -- John Hascall An ill-chosen word is the fool's messenger. Project Vincent Iowa State University Computation Center john@iastate.edu Ames, IA 50011 (515) 294-9551
curt@oasys.dt.navy.mil (Curt Welch) (03/20/91)
In article <9103191412.AA27314@stork.cs.rochester.edu> bukys@cs.rochester.edu writes: >This is a futile plea, I know, but here it is. > > Please stamp out bad PostScript generators. Has anyone written a program to check PostScript files for these types of problems? I don't know PostScript well enough to know if this is feasible, but it must be possible to do some of the checking you complain about. If you could write such a program, then your plea wouldn't be so futile. Curt Welch
toms@fcs260c2.ncifcrf.gov (Tom Schneider) (03/20/91)
> PLEASE put in NEWLINES at reasonable intervals! I wrote a small program that 'wraps words' so that when I take the PostScript output of the fig program it wouldn't smash up on my laserwriter. This will sidestep your problem. The code is in both Pascal and C and available by anonymous ftp from ncifcrf.gov in pub/delila. Files ww.p.Z and ww.p.C are compressed. >John Hascall >Project Vincent >Iowa State University Computation Center john@iastate.edu >Ames, IA 50011 (515) 294-9551 Tom Schneider National Cancer Institute Laboratory of Mathematical Biology Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201 toms@ncifcrf.gov