> >If I were sending around a drawing for comment, I would consider using >PostScript instead. Most everybody can print it, most any graphics >software can generate it. It's effectively read-only, but whether that >matters depends on what you're doing with it. > > Henry Spencer > [EMAIL PROTECTED] I knew this thread was going to catch me sooner or later. May I suggest PDF. PDF is postscript, the diffrence is that postscrip has loops and control logic. PDF gets arround this by using a table to point to re-usable entries. Adobe makes a program called "Distiller." that is actually a suite of programs. One sits on the computer and looks to the OS as a "Printer." I use this to capture web pages to PDF booklets.
As for Postscript itself, It is the only self undocumenting language. I should know as I worked at apple and wrote part of the test suites. You know that little anoying page that prints on power up? Well most of the laser printers shipped between 1992 and 1998 run my code on that page. (And yes you can turn it off, their is a bit in the EErom to do that.) On the subject of CAD, this player piano company I am working for in KY has had no end to trouble opening OrCad. It got to the point where we are using graph paper to make important drawings that anyone can read. Who knows what formats can be read in even the next 5 years. Paper it is proven lasts at least 100 and we have 500 years worth of data to know the failure rates of paper formulas rather well. I am glad there are people that can still speak Mac only, and not starve. Then again at Apple I was the primadonna of postscript. Too bad the language is over 18 years old and has almost no bugs in it. Not to mention that it is Turring complete. I have written FFTs in it (To prove it could be done.) I have a full blown JPEG encoder/Decoder suite that works in level 1 (Which did not have JPEG support.) Inkjets killed postscript. It adds 2 to 500 bucks onto the cost of a printer. Color support is spotty and is HW dependant. A few companies own the good color conversion routines. Much easier to do a simple RGB->CYMK table conversion in the OS than to delve into colorspaces that are so obtuce they are named ABC/XYZ. Give me plain old DXF any day It is plaintext ASCII. I have ps tools for those somewhere too. I peeked ahead and somoene is proposing JPEG for vector graphics. Sure with the right Huffman tables one could build a set of 8 connected patterns and the drawing would not look too bad. All the Q tables do is to band limit the DCT. Mostly I use the PS/JPEG tools to fix damaged files. The main problem and it has been mentioned here is that CAD wants to be 3D and that gets into solid modeling and tolerancing. Somehow all this got turned into a pannecia. A magical solution that works for others. -julie _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
