From owner-freebsd-chat Thu May 18 6:30:34 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from reliant.nielsenmedia.com (reliant.nielsenmedia.com [205.129.32.15]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2F7EF37BE29 for ; Thu, 18 May 2000 06:30:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from David_W_Gray@tvratings.com) Received: from nmrusdunsxg0.nielsenmedia.com (nmrusdunsxg0.nielsenmedia.com [10.9.11.120]) by reliant.nielsenmedia.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA28643; Thu, 18 May 2000 09:29:44 -0400 (EDT) Received: by nmrusdunsxg0.nielsenmedia.com with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) id ; Thu, 18 May 2000 09:29:44 -0400 Message-ID: <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B130336634B@nmrusdunsx1.nielsenmedia.com> From: "Gray, David W." To: "'Brett Glass'" , "'FreeBSD Chat List'" Subject: RE: Do you *believe* this? Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 09:29:40 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Afraid I'll have to go with the latter -- look how short the header is (thats the *whole* thing). You really aren't saving all that much, actually you are trading off dynamic store (the page text, per page) for persistant VM (at least, persistant for that document.) If you've ever seen the monstrosity that Apple has been known to use... (Actually, I had that hacked to the point where it would run on a postscript emulator on the Amiga -- but thats another tale.) -----Original Message----- From: Brett Glass [mailto:brett@lariat.org] Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2000 12:08 AM To: Gray, David W.; 'FreeBSD Chat List' Subject: Re: Do you *believe* this? At 01:40 PM 5/17/2000, Gray, David W. wrote: >For those who don't grok postscript, the prolog is a series of declarations, >which generally form a set of procedures that let the writing program think >of the text to be printed at a somewhat higher level. The entire first part >of this utter abortion is just to let you say "scl" instead of "scale", etc. >There is NO GOOD REASON for it. Some PostScript hackers do this because they want the code to be more compact. This actually DOES matter with large documents since many printers have limited buffer space and/or slow interfaces. Postscript tends to get verbose when a program exercises fine-grained control over kerning, etc., so this is a legitimate reason to declare abbreviated names. Others abbreviate it because they actually want it to be less readable -- especially if it is automatically generated and they want to obscure what their software does to generate it. This is a poor excuse, since it only protects against the laziest reverse engineering. --Brett To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message