🚀 go-pugleaf

henry@trilithon.mpk.ca.us (Henry McGilton) writes:

>The latest issue of the Adobe developer Association newsletter
>contains a kind of apologia for the current state of support
>for LaserTalk and hints at Great Things To Come in future.

According to the person I spoke to at Adobe, there is a new version of
Lasertalk coming soon.  It will have support for Level 2, and cleanup a
few glitches.  It didn't sound like there will be any major new features,
though.  Also, Lasertalk only supports on-screen previewing for a subset
of Level 1 printers, namely those which support the cexec operator.

>Have you considered using a NeXT with DisplayTalk?  You can get a
>pretty good NeXT at prices comparable to Macintosh.  PostScript
>is the imaging model for the NeXT screen, and NeXTSTEP Release
>3.0 supports full blown PostScript Level Two.  DisplayTalk is
>available from Adobe for the NeXT as a PostScript development and
>debugging environment.

I've used Display PostScript and Displaytalk on my DECstation for years.  This
is certainly an attractive environment for developing PostScript.  However,
I already have a Mac, and I'm planning to get a PC for various other reasons.
I don't think I could justify a NeXT machine for home right now.

>We developed all the examples (amounting to around 13,000 lines of
>PostScript code) for our book (``PostScript by Example'', published
>by Addison-Wesley) on NeXTs using just YAP (Yet Another Previewer).
>The response is fast and the instant gratification (uh, I mean
>turnaround) sure beats messing around on a Mac with a printer.

Great book, by the way.  I haven't read it in detail yet, but just from
leafing through and reading here and there, it looks excellent.    You might
want to check with Addison-Wesley about something ... the first copy I bought
was missing the color plates, as were 5 of the other 7 copies in that store.