🚀 go-pugleaf

This is a repost. The first one bounced somewhere. Organization lines
etc may still be strange as on the previous one.


>>I'm sick of dealing with Adobe's poorly written and changing structuring
>>conventions, and even more so with applications that don't make even an
>>effort to comply.  Comments or thoughts?
I agree! I wish the EPS spec didn't change/grow so gradually. At least
it seems to have settled down to numberable versions now. I wrote an
EPS-using application a while ago (basically an EPS editor, to give
interactive/programmed access to most of the things the EPS is meant
to allow). I'll try to summarise what I learnt from this:

(1) EPS is great fun to work with, if done properly. There's nothing
substantially wrong with the file format itself, although there are a
few things I would prefer changed/tightened up. Just picky little
things on the whole, for example:
(1.1) The "%%Creator" line can indicate the person who
drew the picture (or whatever) or the program they used to do it. It
would be much more useful to give these separately - my program had to
try to split them out.
(1.2) Following from the above, it would be nice to know the version
number of the producing package, so that when you merge several files,
you could quickly tell whether they all require the same prologue.

(2) The information you need is quite scattered (two documents from
the Adobe infoserver, and assorted bits of the green book).

(3) Some things are not specified well enough to use them. One I
noticed is the {Begin/End}Object stuff. What constitutes the complete
PS code for an object? Some of the EPS-producing packages I have
written could easily produce "objects", if I thought anyone would read
them as such. Should each object be positioned independently on the
page (ie a moveto from the page origin) or is it OK for them to be
relative to each other? OK, I could have asked Adobe, but for
something I thought no-one would use anyway, I chose to drop the
facility.

(4) Some tools produce poor encapsulation of their PS. For example,
one of the well-known packages put some necessary PS code between
%%EndProlog and the first %%Page marker (to cope with this, I had to
treat everything up to the start of the first page as the prologue - I
don't like having to produce kludges like that to get round other
people's kludges, especially when there is a written spec to follow).

(5) Some tools that encapsulate their PS properly don't produce
conformant PS. One popular word-processor from a company with a good
public reputation, for example, re-encodes fonts the first time each
font is used -- in line -- in the code for a *page*, not in the
prologue at all. Because of this, you can't separate out pages for
printing individually - you can't even print the document entire but
in reverse page order! Not only is the guilty tool one that puts
itself forward as supporting EPS, but it is one that is likely to be
bought and used by end-users who will try to run it with WYSIWYG
layout tools, and who will not all know how to fix things at the
representation level when things go wrong. (I'm not going to name them
here - so you authors of popular WP packages can all go and have a
good look at your output now :-*)



How about a validation service, as well as a program? The program is
fine for those of us who can compile programs etc, but will be of
little use to most end-users. A certificate that can be printed
somewhere on the box for "shrink-wrapped software" could have more
effect in making pressure to improve EPS quality -- perhaps Adobe
could do this? (Rather them than me :-)

And for those of us on the net, perhaps we could have a survey about
EPS usage? My questions would be:

* What features can you reasonably produce in your PS output?
* What features do you want to read, parse and use when importing PS?
* What things would you like to do using EPS if you had suitable tools?
* What horror stories of bad PS do you have? (first-hand or local-site
only).
* What further things would you be interested to see in EPS (read the
specs first - it might be there already, lurking in a dark corner)?
* What things did you find difficult to understand or find in the
documents from Adobe?

Repeating from point (1): Well done overall, Adobe. But I think it now
needs rescuing from misuse and disuse.
--
__John            When asked to attend a court case, Father Moses took with him
          a leaking jug of water. Asked about it, he said: "You ask me to judge
               the faults of another, while mine run out like water behind me."

                jcgs@uk.co.harlqn (UK notation) jcgs@harlqn.co.uk (most places)
    ...!mcvax!ukc!harlqn!jcgs (uucp - really has more stages, but ukc knows us)
John Sturdy                                            Telephone +44-223-872522
                      Harlequin Ltd, Barrington Hall, Barrington, Cambridge, UK