Subject: Re: On the Road to version 1.0
From: Bryce Nesbitt (bryce@obviously.com)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2001 - 10:48:43 CST
Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>
> At 09:43 AM 12/21/2001 -0500, Bryce Nesbitt wrote:
> > > ONLY if you have a Postscript printer! If you have a raster, PCL
> > > or other type of printer, then EPS ends up getting rasterized early on.
> >
> >True, but it gets rasterized at printer resolution, as opposed to
> >screen resolution. You get no bitmap scaling artifacts.
>
> And a properly written word processor would re-rasterize the
> vector data at printer resolution before printing. Currently, you are
> right, we don't do that. BUT it wouldn't be too difficult to change the IM
> plugin to ask for rasterization at printer resolution always! It would
> mean larger .abw files since the images stored therein would be larger -
> but you would get better quality.
Nonono, no need. Purge the bitmps from the .abw files. Store just source
data, rerasterize to the output device on the fly.
> >For Linux I trust Ghostscript's rasterizer more than ImageMagic's (And
> >Ghostscript rasterizes the rest of the page, so why not?).
> IM uses GS for PS/EPS/PDF rasterization.
> Rest of what page?
The rest of the page you're printing. The words, if you have words
on the page.
> >Industry convention with other WP's is that EPS import makes no attempt
> >to "tame" the EPS. The WP just acts as a passthru.
>
> Agreed. And at some point in the future, Abi should do the same.
>
> >When I use Microsoft
> >Publisher, for example, and output to a PCL printer, I get a grainy bitmap.
> That's because Publisher sucks ;). Word does a better job...
>
> >The inherent limitation, and benefit, of EPS is that it's a way to pass
> >PostScript to the lowest possible printing layer. This is good.
> Depends on the OS and WP in question, since each one handles this
> type of thing differently.
>
> But in general, keeping things vector (be it EPS, PDF or SVG)
> until the last minute is definitely the way to go!
And it's the only way to go if you don't know what your output device is
yet!
-Bryce
** Impelemeting EPS support from scratch would be less work, thou... :)
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