On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 02:39:29PM +0000, Camaleón wrote: > On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 23:23:14 +0300, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > >> > >> No major application on the popular DEs outputs PostScript when > >> printing. > > > > I was trying to point out that a PS printer is also a PDF printer. > > And better than PDF, I'd say. > > PostScript specification is by far a more professionally-oriented > language that PDF format (aside comment: last time I checked you could > embed a 3D video animation on a PDF sheet and all kind of > "dynamicallities"... geez!).
No, while PDF does perhaps allow such things, it's far far better than PostScript. PostScript is difficult to process due to the fact that it's a fully- featured Turing-complete language. It's difficult to parse to find page boundaries since you have to process the whole document to be sure. There are standards to mark up the PostScript to make this simpler, but they are optional and can be wrong. Processing it can have unbounded complexity. PDF is a subset of PostScript and does not have a Turing-complete grammar. It means it's possible to process it very fast, and it has structure which PostScript does not. For example, selecting a subset of pages is very fast, and doesn't require processing all the pages in the whole file to extract a few pages. So things like page subsetting, rescaling, n-up printing, etc. become trivial. Also, take a simple task like copying some text out of a PDF; it's easy, because it has a higher-level structure than PostScript. Doing it with PostScript is decidedly non-trivial. Not only do you have to find the text (which might be printed letter by letter), you also have to deal with font subsetting and encoding issues. It might even be bitmaps. PDF is also a superset in other areas. For example, it has support for transparency, gradients (including meshes) and other advanced drawing and rendering which PostScript can't support. If you print this as PostScript, it has to approximate the transparency, gradients etc. with thousands of smaller objects, and the file size can balloon to tens of times its original size (I've had multi-gigabyte PostScript files generated from tens to hundreds of megabyte PDFs). Being able to print natively as PDF means you can just transfer the PDF and avoid such lossy conversion. It also supports colour profiles for accurate colour reproduction. A native PDF workflow is far, far better and vastly more flexible than a native PostScript workflow. PDF/A is normally used for printing--it's the sensible subset without all the pointless bells and whistles. PDF is the successor to PostScript, which eliminates the mistakes of the format (being fully programmable, and lacking in many modern features), while adding a few of its own (stupid additional features). Ignore those extra features, and it's a much, much better solution than PostScript. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' schroot and sbuild http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools `- GPG Public Key F33D 281D 470A B443 6756 147C 07B3 C8BC 4083 E800 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120726162726.gw25...@codelibre.net
