Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 22:07:36 -0600 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: "Gray, David W." <David_W_Gray@tvratings.com>, "'FreeBSD Chat List'" <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Do you *believe* this? Message-ID: <4.3.1.2.20000517220148.00cd6cb0@localhost> In-Reply-To: <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B130336634A@nmrusdunsx1.niels enmedia.com>
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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
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