Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!husc6!linus!encore!bzs
From: bzs@encore.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Is NeWS UseABLE?
Message-ID: <3499@encore.UUCP>
Date: 20 Aug 88 21:35:28 GMT
Article-I.D.: encore.3499
References: <229.8808111329@jura.ritd.co.uk>
Organization: Encore Computer Corp, Marlboro, MA
Lines: 30
In-reply-to: mr@ritd.co.UK's message of 12 Aug 88 12:40:50 GMT


(I swear I am trying to remain open-minded, don't confuse hard questions
with strong opinions.)

Does there exist any graphics editor which can take a postscript image
description and let you edit it visually in some useful way?

Is this hard? I think it's possible, but my intuitions say it's very
hard, not sure why exactly other than that such editors tend to want
object descriptions and postscript doesn't particularly lend itself to
that (it could be enforced as a discipline of course, I mean that
given some random graphic image from someone it won't likely be
structured in any particularly useful way.)

So such programs have to define some other file format, typically
their own (I guess QuickDraw was designed with this in mind?), which
can later be translated to postscript if desired.

This tends to deny the idea that ps is an image transmission/storage
language. If I store an interesting image in ps I'm not sure I can
later edit it (say a bunch of clip-art I might want to touch up for
layout later, I suppose anything is possible by simply overlaying with
new opaque elements, but the real issue is being able to do something
like point to an area and say "fill it w/ gray 80%" or change the light
source.)

What would it have taken to have made postscript also appropropriate
for graphical editing? Not sure. This is just a bunch of questions.

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||