Re: Any cheap postscript laser printers for linux ?

anton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Anton Ertl) writes:

"Mark T.B. Carroll" <Mark.Carroll@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
You can do things in PS you can't do in PDF, and
vice-versa. For instance, the PS self-formatting stuff I mentioned
elsewhere in this thread, I couldn't have done using PDF. But, you can
do transparency much easier in PDF than you can in PS. That's why it's
so much work to, say, write a converter from PS to PDF - they have
significant differences.

It's not more work than any other Postscript interpreter; just instead
of letting the graphics operators render the stuff, just collect them
into a PDF. If you have a Postscript interpreter (e.g., gs), you can
do that by redefining the names of these operators to output the PDF
graphics commands and their parameters, then appending the Postscript
file you want to convert, and let all of that run through your
Postscript interpreter. That's how early versions of the distiller
worked.

Er, yes, it's easy to write a converter from PS to PDF if most of the
work was already done for you! My point is simply that PDF isn't 'PS
inside' (as was alleged) which is one big reason why GhostScript is a
non-trivial program.

Mmmm, I've used the same trick myself, actually, for a sort of PS -> PS
thing where I didn't trust the printer in particular ways so I redefined
a bunch of operators to have them output a much simpler PS program that
was simply strokes and curves and things and ran that through gs. It
would have been easy to convert the resulting PS to PDF.

Mark
.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Any cheap postscript laser printers for linux ?
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