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From: phil@RICE.EDU (William LeFebvre)
Newsgroups: comp.laser-printers
Subject: Why I think I dislike PostScript
Message-ID: <8707282014.AA19351@brillig.umd.edu>
Date: Wed, 15-Jul-87 14:19:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: brillig.8707282014.AA19351
Posted: Wed Jul 15 14:19:40 1987
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>From: Southall.pa@xerox.com
> There is, in principle at least, a way of making your own
> PostScript versions of Computer Modern fonts. If you set
> 
> tracingchoices:=1
...
> What you *don't* get with this approach is Adobe's proprietary 'font
> magic', which looks after the preservation of character features when
> their own character shape descriptions are digitized at low and medium
> resolutions....The results of the Metafont-to-PostScript conversion
> will be less satisfactory in text sizes than pixel files produced with
> Metafont's own digitizing algorithm.

From this I assert the following claim:  what you don't get with
PostScript is any versatility in digitizing your own fonts.  You are
stuck with the algorithms that Adobe uses.  Worse than that, you cannot
even get to all the algorithms that Adobe has, unless you know about
the "magic".  Am I right?  Is it true that the only type of font
description which can be given to a PostScript engine is a spline-based
one?

>From: prj@pm-prj.lcs.mit.edu
> The lab I work in has just started converting to using PostScript
> printers as our standard printers.  We are now getting complaints from
> our TeX users about how slow printing is for them now.  Quotes range
> from an average of 2 pages per minute up to a max of 5 pages per minute
> (both on the "24 pages/minute" PS2400s).  Since this must be a common
> problem for other academic and research institutions....

5 pages per minute?  I get better performance out of our Imagen 2308:
8 pages per minute and it isn't a PostScript engine.  From this I
assert the following claim:  PostScript engines are very slow.  Perhaps
someday in the distant future they might be running an acceptable
speed---when we start using 68030 processors in them and when we start
putting them on Ethernets (so that transmitting the very verbose
document description won't slow us down as much).

Abstractions are very nice from a theoretical standpoint.  Certain
abstractions are also very nice in practice.  PostScript is a very nice
abstraction.  But when the abstraction severely impedes performance and
versatility, I begin to question its practical value.

By the way, I have never had the need or the sudden urge to print text
in a spiral (or for that matter, at any orientation other than 0 and 90
degrees).

			William LeFebvre
			Department of Computer Science
			Rice University