Cross-platform postscript would be extraordinarily valuable for a number of reasons: - publishing to imagesetters - publishing to PDF documents - the postscript generated on the BeOS blows donkey dinks. It a humongous postscript file of a bitmap, more suitable for printing on an inkjet printer than a laser printer. Basically they punted when they wrote the PS printer driver - you'd be able to modify the PS files, or use them as input to PS editing programs, to make encapsulated postscript files out of them Yes, some platforms have the ability to generate postscript from the printer driver, but with the BeOS being an extreme example, I'm sure any platform will definitely demonstrate that you get better postscript if you print directly to postscript then transport it to your postscript device without going through a printer driver. Even on the Mac there is the laserwriter utility so someone who preferred this route (I've done it) can print to postscript from AbiWord and submit it to the printer. It also opens up the possibility of, ah, I forget what it's called but there's a high-end publishing protocol where you put screen-resolution graphic proxies in your document and print to postscript, then high-res images that may be hundreds of megabytes are inserted into place at the print spooler for final output. Publishers and service bureaus routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars for this functionality - imagine they could publish to it with AbiWord! Also, on the Mac at least, there's a very simple way to stream postscript directly to the printer from a program. You read in a resource with a certain ID from the printer driver resource file and the first few bytes in the resource header are a jump table so you just call into the resource as subroutines with certain offsets. It's very easy, I could write code to do this for you on the Mac in a few hours. My program Working Watermarker is a virus-like hack on this resource. Mike Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
