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||