I second the general grousing about printers and postscript. For years, before the appearance of Acrobat 7 and Firefox 3, I could print postscript level 2 to my HP Laserjet 4M and things would Just Work. I got an HP2605dn color postscript printer, and that Just Worked too. While the 2605 is pretty, the toner cartridges are expensive and chipped. The 4M toner cartridges are cheaper and higher capacity, and I can do a refill for $20 (and an occasional ruined pair of old pants). So color when I need it, B&W on the 4M, happy happy joy joy.
Now, Acrobat 7 insists on using Postscript level 3, which won't print on the 4M . Firefox 3 throws an Invalid Font message on the 4M , and displays really ugly text on the 2605. WTF??? Worse yet is that these tools emit Really Ugly postscript. The original postcript language is strange and stack oriented, but it is readable; I've written quite a few tools in raw postscript. The obfuscated crap turned out Acrobat and Firefox builds deeply nested macros, sends text embedded in binaries or rendered as pixels, and in general is nearly impossible for humans to read. It is also bloated and slow to render. The new Firefox uses "cairo" as part of the tool chain, so the "postscript" files are now even larger and even more obtuse and hard to render. So I use Firefox 2.0.0.19 and Acrobat 5 a lot. It would be nice to have a backend tool that turned postscript 3 into postscript 2 that I could filter the output of the newer tools through. Or at least some debugging tools that could help me interpret it. Unlikely; it surprises me that printers could ever make sense of it, much less filter tools and people. In my spare time, I imagine postscript purgatory, the afterlife where the programmers that wrote this crap are required to render, by hand, every page output that ever passed through their godawful code. When they finally manage to render every pixel on all the billions of pages that users worldwide have suffered through, their work is checked. If they get every pixel right, they go to Heaven (to make a few centuries of groveling personal apologies). Otherwise, they start over. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
