[texhax] PostScript output (from XeTeX)?

Peter Davis pfd at pfdstudio.com
Fri Dec 3 14:16:44 CET 2010


On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 8:04 AM, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com>wrote:

> On Dec 2, 2010, at 3:00 PM, Peter Davis wrote:
>
> > There are shops whose workflows are highly optimized around PostScript.
>  Pure PDF RIPs, and especially PDF/VT (the variable-transactional version of
> PDF) are relatively new and not widely used.  Probably most RIPs in the
> world convert PDF to PostScript before rasterizing.
>
> Fair enough, but if one is going to limit oneself to last century's
> technology then one should not be surprised that one is bound to the
> limitations of last century's font and encoding limitations &c. w/o some
> work-arounds I'd be loathe to use in a production environment.
>

Unfortunately, older technology does not instantly disappear the minute
something better is invented.  In delivering software solutions, it's often
necessary to work with what is deployed, as most companies tend to have
finite budgets.


>
> See my TUG2003 paper on using Zapfino for one such work-around.
>

Do you mean "There is no end: Omega and Zapfino", TUGboat 24(2)?  Looks
interesting.  I'll take a look.


>
> There used to be a British guy who advocated a ``tiny typesetter'' using
> raw postscript code --- if you need PostScript (which I don't recall being
> in your original requirements) perhaps that would work better?
>
> Ah, here we are:
>
> http://www.cappella.demon.co.uk/tinyfiles/tinymenu.html
>
>
Interesting.  There's also Graham Freeman's Quikscript.

But this is beside the point.  There are commercial workflows today that
depend on PostScript as the page description language, so that's the world I
must work in.

-pd
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