[comp.lang.postscript] PostScript Printers Attached to Facsimile Boards

ib@apolling (Ivan N. Bach) (02/28/90)

Adobe proposed last year a new use for PostScript.  We are going to have
a fax board which will determine whether the receiving facsimile machine
is connected to a PostScript printer.  It will then transmit a PostScript
program instead of a bitmap over telephone lines.  If we are going to have
a large number of facsimile machines attached to PostScript printers, there
will be a large number of transmissions of PostScript programs over telephone
lines.  Most of the time you will not look at the transmitted PostScript code,
but you will still pay for its readability.  When you get your long-distance 
telephone bills, you will find out exactly how much the readable format of
PostScript is costing you.  Maybe then you will understand why I think that
PostScript interpreters should also support a binary format.

Ivan N. Bach                      Tel (408) 986-9400, x508
QMS, Inc.                         Fax (408) 727-3725 
2650 San Tomas Expressway         arpa: ib@imagen.com 
Santa Clara, CA 95051             uucp: decwrl!imagen!ib 

les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) (03/01/90)

In article <9464@imagen.UUCP> ib@apolling (Ivan N. Bach) writes:
>Adobe proposed last year a new use for PostScript.  We are going to have
>a fax board which will determine whether the receiving facsimile machine
>is connected to a PostScript printer.

>Most of the time you will not look at the transmitted PostScript code,
>but you will still pay for its readability.

Are you implying that the postscript code will not be compressed for
transmission as fax image data is?   Or is there some reason to believe
that another format would be more compact than compressed ascii postscript?
If the application generating the code takes care to redefine the common
operations to single character names, plain text postscript doesn't have
to be especially bulky anyway.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us