Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!husc6!bbn!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!andrew.cmu.edu!sg1q+
From: sg1q+@andrew.cmu.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: efficiency
Message-ID: <8WqXnPy00XcOQQI0e6@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 12 Jul 88 16:22:51 GMT
Organization: Carnegie Mellon
Lines: 24
In-Reply-To: <3372@phri.UUCP>

Roy Smith presented some questions about when to write difficult but simplified
code for the sake of printer efficiency.

I'm not quite sure whether you're comparing programming time vs. printer speed,
or the speed of the computer vs. the speed of the printer.  In the first case,
printer time almost always costs less than programmer time, plus it aggravates
at laserwriter a lot less than it aggravates me to do all that stupid math :-)
In the second case, unless you want to spend as much time writing good code to
do the work of the printer on the source computer as Adobe did writing the
PostScript interpreter in the first place, you're are probably much better off
using all the neat stuff that's already there.  (like 45 rotate)

It seems kind of silly to have all the power of the PostScript interpreter, and
then ignore it.  I'd rather let Adobe do their job, and I'll do mine.

All this is not to say that there aren't things you might want to do to make
things easier for the printer, but in general "if it ain't broke, don't fix
it."  In other words if it it isn't taking an inordinate amount of time for
something to print out, don't worry about it.

The places where PostScript starts to whine are more at the level of imaging,
not simple path manipulation.

-Simon Gatrall                  sg1q+@andrew.cmu.edu