Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!AHWAHNEE.STANFORD.EDU!dcrocker
From: dcrocker@AHWAHNEE.STANFORD.EDU (Dave Crocker)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  PostScript Versus ASCII
Message-ID: <8910020153.AA23778@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 1 Oct 89 18:02:49 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 23

Postscript is the ointment.  I perceive a fly:

We may recall that people used to refer, rather simply, to having
their software run on "Unix".  These days, people are a little more careful
to indicate the specific FLAVOR of Unix that it runs on.

I use WordPerfect, at home, and am going through some wars to get it
to print a postscript file on a non-directly attached and non-Apple
postscript engine.  No luck.  Wordperfect apparently produces a file
that is a) broken and b) tailored specifically to the Apple.  Even if I
have some details wrong, my point is that we need to have VERY precisely
specified details about what Postscript is acceptable and, I believe,
we will then find that much/most Postscript-generating software is
marginally non-compliant.

There can be no reasonable question about the benefit of being able to
use mixed text/graphics for document production and it seems remarkable
that there is still a barrier to doing it.  I suspect that there needs to
be a coordinated effort to get a sufficiently universal and consistent
mechanism, particularly if you wish to avoid excessively favoring any
single word-processing/publishing-package vendor.

Dave