Re: gs and meeting stuff at end [was Re: tlug: "L. Peter Deutsch": Announcing the release of Aladdin Ghostscript 5.0]

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

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> This is also of interest to me.  I've recently began using
    Craig> PDF files to exchange documents with the few people I know

_I_ don't generate PDF files, but Ghostscript has had some support for 
writing PDF since at least 4.51.  In 5.0 it's fully supported, in that 
there are utilities for PS to PDF and PDF to PS, and even PS level 2
to PS level 1 and stuff like that.  Whether the utilities have
convenient front ends I can't say.

    Craig> people seem to understand Adobe Acrobat.  One of the people
    Craig> I was sending files to had problems printing from a Mac.
    Craig> Perhaps this was due to incompatible PDF versions?  When

Dunno.  I have a pretty low opinion in general of the ability of Mac
people to work out even simple configuration problems.  (Which is
exactly why the Mac is a wonderful thing - in general, they don't need
to.)

    >> The CID/CMap support will eventually mean much better support
    >> for Kanji (no more 3 versions of the same font for different
    >> encodings and TeX and that and this).

    Craig> I would be interested in hearing more about this.  I guess
    Craig> it is not working yet?

Don't know.  Support is "partial," but it may be up to this task.

In any case what is really needed to be really effective the leaf
fonts of the Type 0 kanji fonts need to be set up to be read from
disk.  This combined with CID should allow for relatively fast loading
of only the needed glyphs, with minimal cruft for handling encoding
bogosity.  It should also allow for creation of minimal-sized "font
headers" which would make the file self-contained, somewhat as PDF
files are.  It's this kind of tedious work that hasn't been done yet,
I think.  I started on it once, but learning Postscript from scratch
is tough (my first language was FORTRAN, which may be Forth to 4
decimal places, but it looks more like Java than Postscript :-).

    Craig>   3) GhostScript 4.03 with free Wada PostScript fonts from 
    Craig> 東大 Good: don't have to hack gs Neg: have to hack fontcap
    Craig> (can someone comment on font quality?)

Fonts are not as good as MS or Adobe IMO.  They are clean enough,
nothing to be ashamed of, but they don't make you stand up and take
notice.

    Craig>   4) The 2.x GhostScript that comes with the JE
    Craig> distribution Good: widely used by JE people and can thus
    Craig> ask other people for help Neg: limited print device
    Craig> support.

More negs: no support for PDF, slow.  Doesn't work with gv as far as I
know, and support for ghostview is limited.

    Craig> Re: Large Japanese Files Another thing is that I'm having
    Craig> problems printing large Japanese files.  I have to break
    Craig> the file up into smaller pieces.  I'm using gs4.03 with the
    Craig> vflib patch and TrueType fonts.  Is this a common problem?

Never seen anything like that.  I've seen gs SIGSEGV when a malloc
fails, but closing Netscape fixes that every time.  :-)

Ciao

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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