Re: [PLUG] Postscript (was Re: John "MAD DOG" Hall)

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2001 at 11:05:25AM -0400, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> At 10:46 AM -0400 10/11/01, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> >It's ridiculous that ps *cannot* be (usefully) used as an
> >on-disk format in these operating systems,
> 
> 	PS can certainly be used as an on-disk format, but it's not 
> useful for anything other than printing - since that's what it is 
> for!  Postscript is a PRINTER DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE - it was designed 
> for sending to a printer to final output.  It's use on screen, and 
> weird things like Display Postscript (DPS) were hacks, more so than 
> anything else.

I remember having a terribly hard time trying to print a postscript
document on a postscript window printer under NT 4.0.  Maybe things
have gotten better, but then the problem was that windows always
wanted to associate the file with some application which would decide
how to print it.  Postscript files don't fit well into this model.
They're already formatted for printing, so you just want to send them
to the printer as is.

There were two workarounds that I was aware of.  One was to associate
the network postscript printer with lpt1 (or 2, etc.) and enter
something like

  copy foo.ps lpt1

from a command prompt.

The other solution was a simple windows app I found that acted as a
passthru for printing.  You could drag a postscript file onto it, and
it would just send it on untouched to a printer.

Walt

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