[texhax] PostScript output (from XeTeX)?

Peter Davis pfd at pfdstudio.com
Fri Dec 3 15:10:44 CET 2010


On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 8:59 AM, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com>wrote:

> On Dec 3, 2010, at 8:16 AM, Peter Davis wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Which should be spent wisely. I know a RIP is a big investment (we recently
> upgraded ours), but the Adobe PDF Print Engine is an excellent bit of
> software, and well worth it.
>


Not my decision to make.


> > There are commercial workflows today that depend on PostScript as the
> page description language, so that's the world I must work in.
>
> If that's the case, I'd look at wrapping up all of the complex Unicode
> stuff in .eps files and pulling those in w/ some sort of PostScript-oriented
> workflow.
>

The vast majority of what we're doing today needs only ISO 8659-1, so there
really is no complex Unicode stuff, though we'd certainly like to keep that
option open for the future.


>
> Probably one could re-work xdvipdfmx so as to emit PostScript code instead
> (as you are aware, PDF is in many ways a subset of PostScript), but I
> suspect one would find a lot of edge cases which would mung up a lot of
> paper before one achieved tool one could rely on.
>


Well, there are ways to validate PostScript without actually munging up
paper.

In fairness, I'm also going to explore the PDF->PS route to see what kind of
performance I can get.  I've used the pdf2ps tool that's included in XPDF in
the past, and it was reasonably fast.

Thanks,
-pd
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