🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <17480@rpp386.cactus.org>, woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker)
writes:
> First, PS is a GENERAL PURPOSE programming language
> with an imaging model as it's base.

This is true, and both the language and the imaging model are quite well
documented.  The fact that the PostScript imaging model does not provide
a means to "read back" the current image isn't a deficiency in Adobe's
docs--it was a conscious design decision, and one (in fact) that I agree
with.  300 dpi bitmaps are tractable; 2540 ones aren't, and there do in
fact exist PostScript printers that use display lists instead of a page
buffer (and then they render things a band at a time).

One of the nice things that NeWS does is to add a few operators (like
"copyarea") that act on the page image without letting the programmer
make any assumptions about its resolution, etc.

Of course, some enterprising hacker type could quite easily write a
bit of 68000 machine code to do this and load it in with cexec...  This
would be a much more "traditional hacker" approach than whining :-).

> Perhaps I am a bit of a hacker,
> if some one tells me something is "off limits" etc, I'm going to find out
> why.

Even so, no one has any obligation to help you, especially not Adobe...
Going off on your own is just that.  No one is saying you can't hack
your printer to your heart's content, Woody.  All some of us are saying
is that, however nifty the things are that you find out, they're not
part of PostScript (except for Type 1 fonts, and even that's borderline),
and that because of this, Adobe has very valid reasons for not encouraging
people to write PostScript code that depends on them.  They're parts of the
LaserWriter (or maybe the Redstone controller, at best), not PostScript.

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation
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