haugelan@unix.cis.pitt.edu (John C. Haugeland) (01/29/91)
I would like to obtain the Adobe documents about PostScript on the
NeXT. I know about the E-mail file server at adobe.com, but I'm having
trouble using in (and it seems unnecessarily clumsy anyway), because
the files are so big. So I have two questions:
1) Why are the files so big, given that the documents are short. For
instance, according to the "Developer Technical Resources Catalog,"
the document called "Display PostScript System: NeXT Overview" is
11 pages; but according to the "Index of Documents" from the Adobe
file server, the PostScript file is 84k -- why?
2) Is there any other way I can get these files than via mail from this
file server? In particular, are they available for anonymous ftp
from anywhere (a much more plausible & efficient transfer method
IMHO -- at least for those with access to it). Or, failing that,
is there anybody I might coax into sending them to me on a floppy
disk (MS-DOS or Mac format okay)?
Thanks in advance.
- John Haugeland
haugelan@unix.cis.pitt.edu
new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) (01/29/91)
In article <84525@unix.cis.pitt.edu> haugelan@unix.cis.pitt.edu (John Haugeland) writes: >1) Why are the files so big, given that the documents are short. For > instance, according to the "Developer Technical Resources Catalog," > the document called "Display PostScript System: NeXT Overview" is > 11 pages; but according to the "Index of Documents" from the Adobe > file server, the PostScript file is 84k -- why? I've looked at these. I believe it is the ones created with FrameMaker that are the big ones. I'm not sure I remember right, but anybody with the files can tell just by looking at the first few lines, so no flames, please. It appears as if each page contains most or all of the prolog. This slows down the printing and makes the files really big. Also, a hint: if you only want to print out a few pages, page one must be first; it seems to define something that the other pages use that I didn't feel the need to track down. Note that the file about scrolling, while only 14 pages, is several meg beccause of the pictures included. On the other hand, they all printed on our laserwriters, which is more than I can say for many TeX-originated postscript files. -- --- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware --- ----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, Formal Description Techniques (esp. Estelle), Coffee, Amigas ----- =+=+=+ Let GROPE be an N-tuple where ... +=+=+=
Andrew Gilmartin (01/29/91)
In article <84525@unix.cis.pitt.edu> haugelan@unix.cis.pitt.edu (John C. Haugeland) writes: >1) Why are the files so big, given that the documents are short. For > instance, according to the "Developer Technical Resources Catalog," > the document called "Display PostScript System: NeXT Overview" is > 11 pages; but according to the "Index of Documents" from the Adobe > file server, the PostScript file is 84k -- why? The answer seems to be simple: PostScript output from most applications is not a good choice for document distribution. The Postscript contains too much initialization code for, very often, little content. I don't suggest that Adobe distribute their documents in their original proprietary application format, but I do wish they would distribute them using a clean PostScript encoding. With the wealth of design and programming talent at Adobe I expect they could easily design a page layout that could be rendered with a human readable PostScript encoding; The encoding would be light on initialization and interference with the text. I don't like to read TeX documents in the raw but am glad that I can. Has anyone thought about creating PostScript code to directly handle TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoded texts? The TEI encoding is a logical choice for document distrbution. -- Andrew Gilmartin Computing & Information Services Brown University (401) 863-7305 andrew@brownvm.brown.edu (internet) andrew@brownvm (bitnet)