Re: The Death of Carbon

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:06:25 -0800, Daniel Johnson wrote
(in article <13mdsmvpceehmfc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):


"George Graves" <gmgraves2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0001HW.C38AF5B008A0873FF0182648@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sun, 16 Dec 2007 12:31:11 -0800, Daniel Johnson wrote
(in article <13mb2ogi5j2bb65@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):
You *do* get rather nice PostScript support on the Mac today, which is
nice
too. Classic Mac OS didn't have that, though Mac users often insisted
that
it did. They confused application support for PostScript with the OS,
which
(if you looked) offered less than Windows of the time.

While its true that Macs required Adobe Type Manager to rasterize
PostScript
fonts on the fly, Apple had PostScript printers when Windows was still
running DOS (1985, to be precise).

Yes. DOS had nothing to offer in printing, and Mac OS was noticably better.
Windows was better still, however.

Right. That's why the lion's share of the prepress industry belongs to Macs.
Because Windows printing is so much better. If I had a dollar for every
company that I have helped out because they couldn't get PostScript printing
to work reliably with Windows, I'd be a rich man. Also wasn't it the original
developer of ActiveX (who's name escapes me) who once said that Windows
printing and especially it's PostScript printing support was so screwed-up
that the entire OS would have to rewritten from scratch to fix it? Now things
might have changed with XP and Vista (I have no printing troubleshooting
experience with either of them), but I can tell you printing with Windows in
Win95 through ME was a complete disaster.

Starting with OS 6.8, Mac OS shipped with
a rasterizer for TrueType and it was system level (I.E. not an add-on) by
OS7.0.

Yes. But of course, TrueType is not PostScript.

I'm not sure when either Windows or Mac started rasterizing PostScript
fonts on-screen without ATM , or if Windows ever did (Most Windows users
seemed to be content with TrueType).

Windows does not, to this day, rasterize PostScript fonts. It does TrueType
and its relatives, and did so starting with Windows 3.1 or so. Slightly
*after* the Mac got this technology.

TrueType was, briefly, an advantage for the Mac in printing to raster
printers. But it only lasted about a year, not enough time to make much of a
difference.

The prepress industry prefers Type-1 fonts, but frankly, because of the way
it worked (one file containing both screen and vector font files) I thought
it was way better than Adobe's model which has separate screen fonts and
printer (vector) fonts. Even today it's possible to have orphan Type-1 screen
font suitcases or orphan printer fonts.

I do know that OSX with Quartz and Quartz Extreme rasterize all PostScript
to
the screen by doing an on-the-fly conversion, to PDF. In fact the Mac
version
of InDesign allows the user the option (by choosing "High Quality
Display") in
either the App Preferences or the Display pull-down menu to fully
rasterize placed
EPS images to the screen for true WYSIWYG.

This is a nice thing you can do thanks to Quartz's "PDF nature". You didn't
get this on Classic Mac OS because QuickDraw was just too different from
PostScript.

Yes, I know. But that was then, this is now.

The Windows version of this app does not have this feature
(or the ability to print the document directly to PDF (again with fully
rasterized placed PostScript and elements) without using Distiller (or any
other PDF authoring environment) or leaving the app). Apple's decision to
use Display PDF for their screen draws was a very smart move on their
part.
It makes handling PDFs a system-level task that OSX handles seamlessly and
transparently.

Sadly, Microsoft and Adobe were not able to come to terms about this sort of
thing. Microsoft now has the unenviable task of trying to dislodge
PostScript with some printer language that will let Windows do stuff like
this. XPS is supposed to do that, and we'll see how it plays out.

I dunno. PostScript is so ensconced in the printing and publishing industry
and PDF is so widely used in about every industry, that I really don't see
anything challenging it. After all, Neither MS or Apple could topple Adobe
Type-1 fonts even with a superior technology like True-Type.



--
The only reason that the air we breathe is free, is because the corporate
world has been unable to figure out a practical way to meter it.

.

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