Xref: utzoo comp.lang.forth:557 comp.lang.postscript:963 comp.windows.news:780 comp.windows.misc:692 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!princeton!njin!rutgers!mailrus!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth,comp.lang.postscript,comp.windows.news,comp.windows.misc Subject: Why you shouldn't use NeWS as a tool to learn PostScript Keywords: Forth, Lisp, Interactive PostScript, NeWS Message-ID: <3496@phri.UUCP> Date: 20 Sep 88 14:53:14 GMT References: <13613@mimsy.UUCP> <3492@phri.UUCP> <23378@wlbr.EATON.COM> Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY) Lines: 42 Original-Subject: Re: type checking (I want PostScript) -- give NeWS a try! mh@wlbr.eaton.com.UUCP (Mike Hoegeman) writes: > Here's all you have to do. > > newshost % psh > newshost % executive > Welcome to NeWS 1.1 > erasepage 10 10 moveto (Hello world!) show > : > ...etc... > : > Yeah, well, that's sort of my point. I just tried doing exactly that. What I got was the background pattern blanking out. The window in which I ran the psh happened to be in the lower-left corner of my screen, so I figured maybe the "Hellow world!" was hiding underneath it. When I dragged it away, instead of finding the message, I got the grey background redrawn wherever I dragged the window from. Feeding that line to psh again did indeed give me the message down in the lower-left corner of the screen. Hardly intuitive, and even with this simplest of examples, you're already having to worry about things like windows. Of course, you might simply use psview instead of psh, but that has it's own subtle non-PostScript-isms like not having to put a showpage on the end, and not dealing very well with rotated or scaled fonts. Well, OK, maybe that's not so bad. Let's see what happens when I feed that same bit of PostScript to a LaserWriter: %%[ Error: invalidaccess; OffendingCommand: show ]%% %%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%% Hmm, that's odd. Of course, the reason is that I had no current font set. This didn't bother NeWS because NeWS seems to have a default current font already set when you fire up a psh. I still maintain that NeWS is different enough from PostScript to make in inadvisable to use the former as a tool for learning the latter. -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net "The connector is the network"