> > Another important issue is security. PS, as a > > programming language, allows far too much things.
To put this into perspective, many people have no qualms running arbitrary javascript code in their browsers, not only from from the URL displayed by the browser but also from uncounted other third-party sources usually not shown to the user. And javascript is also a full-fledged programming language. In browsers, the execution of code is pretty well sandboxed nowadays, and in principle something similar should also be possible for other programming languages. Ghostscript has a "safer" option to restrict what the program can access in the file system, but I don't know how rigorously it has been tested under attack. Overall I unfortunately have to agree: the more you enable, the more dangerous it becomes. > The same person who uses PS normally uses a shell. How is > access to the shell from within PS any more of a security > hazard than access from without? Depends on what you consider "using a shell". If you mean "typing commands by hand", I'd say that's pretty safe because you should be aware of the effects of individual commands. If you mean "running all kinds of shell scripts downloaded from somewhere", that could be pretty dangerous if you haven't verified what they do. Unfortunately, the latter interpretation would be the one that applies to documents for whose creators you can't vouch.
