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At 07:44 AM 2/29/2004, Rich Sprague wrote:
Could you please explain your rationale, here, so people can understand why you are making this claim?
Postscript generation in Mac OS X takes a strange a indirect path, unlike generation of PS on Mac OS 9...AND things changed between 10.2 and 10.3...
On 9, applications either printed directly in Postscript (in which case it was written directly to disk) OR they printed in QuickDraw which was converted in the PS driver to PS and then written/printed.
In OS X, applications can print either in "PS in PICT" (one PICT file, PER PAGE, with embedded Postscript), or Quartz. In the latter case, Quartz is converted to PDF and then PDF is sent to the printing system - and to get Postscript, the PDF is converted to Postscript and then fed to the PS "printer driver". In the former case, the PICTs are "unwrapped" and the PS data is sent to the driver along with job-level instructions and then printed/saved. Since the apps can't write entire jobs of PS, only page-level PS, it's not possible to send a "pure PS stream" to the printer as it was in 9.
With 10.3, things got even more interesting when Apple made two more changes to the print system. First, they added the ability to send a PDF directly from an application to the printer - this is what Acrobat 6.0.1 does, thus speeding up printing to non-PS printers. Second, the integrated Adobe Normalizer providing a PS->PDF conversion in the printing system to allow printing of PS from apps like Quark and Illustrator to non-PS printers.
Bottom line - there is NO WAY for an application in OS X to produce the EXACT STREAM of PS that will be sent to the printer as there was in OS 9 - and as such, it should be considered "tainted". Even more important is that the PDF->PS process used for non-PS generating application (ie. anything that isn't prepress, or that is written in Cocoa) will create PS that if then fed back into Distiller will generate poor quality PDFs - most esp. with non-searchable fonts :(.
So, if you are using Mac OS X, and your goal is high quality PDF - go DIRECTLY from your authoring application!
Leonard
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Rosenthol <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Chief Technical Officer <http://www.pdfsages.com> PDF Sages, Inc. 215-629-3700 (voice) 215-629-0789 (fax)
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