Re: [tlug] Re: "Password on localhost"

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > In fact, it's a general problem amongst any systems, printer or not,
 > rendering in the area once known as "typesetting." Two examples not
 > involving printers:
 > 
 >     1. Opening the exact same OpenOffice Writer document on a Windows
 >     box and on my NetBSD box gives me documents with a different number
 >     of pages.

This, however, is a solved problem.  Use TeX. ;-)  (Of course you
*can't* always use TeX, but the vendor of your wordprocessor should!)

 >     2. Viewing the same web page in Linux Firefox versus NetBSD Firefox,
 >     both running on my NetBSD laptop and using the same X server, gives
 >     me quite noticably different textual output (different fonts,
 >     different formatting).

That's no bug, that is a feature.

 > And neither OpenOffice nor xpdf (for which I've installed the
 > xpdf-japanese package) will display Japanese on my system, which even
 > there I can't be bothered to fix.

Hrmf.  No offense intended, but that's not something I've had to think
about for a decade, I think.  I know other people have problems, but
xdvi and xpdf "always" worked for me on Debian and now Mac, and
NeoOrifice sorta works (modulo the "wordprocesser assumes rendering
engine is Microsoft Windows" problem which I do suffer from, and the
huge amount of time it takes to start up, and then even more to read a
document, on a unicore 1.25GHz PPC Mac).

 > And let's not forget that there's a good deal of essential (as opposed
 > to accidental) complexity in a typesetting system itself; see the
 > sources to troff or TeX+LaTeX.

Yah, but AFAICT DVI and Postscript really are device-independent.  So
that part of the complexity is not really part of the "printing
problem" which is to CUPS as fire is to gasoline.