🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <809@adobe.UUCP> greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid) writes:
>When you write a PostScript language program to a file, there are only
>three likely uses of it, in my opinion:

>	1.  The user wants to drag the file to another system for
>	    printing, or mail it to his friend, or otherwise export
>	    the file.

>	2.  The user wants to paste it into another application as
>	    an illustration (EPS file).

>	3.  The user is a hacker and wants to hack and look at PS.
>
>In cases 1 and 2 above, you don't want ^D in the file.  And if all you
>want to do is to print it on your dedicated printer, a three-line
>script will do it.  Or you can COPY PSEOF.TXT yourself, since you
>typically have 30 seconds before you timeout.

>Sigh.  I wish this weren't such a problem.

Why aren't the things that actually handle postscript intelligently
(i.e. print spoolers and programs that include EPS into a larger
postscript entity) smart enough to delete the embedded ^D put out
at the end of a file by ordinary applications.  If the postscript
in question is in a file, it's pretty easy to see that the ^D is
the last character and delete it when it is not appropriate.  Even
if the data comes from a pipe it only takes one character of read-ahead
to detect it.
Am I missing something here?  Is there any case where a ^D at the end
of a file would mean something other than EOF in postscript?  Making
PS-aware programs deal with this would allow "dumb" programs/drivers
to work with the embedded ^D.

Les Mikesell