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Date:      Thu, 18 May 2000 09:29:40 -0400
From:      "Gray, David W." <David_W_Gray@tvratings.com>
To:        "'Brett Glass'" <brett@lariat.org>, "'FreeBSD Chat List'" <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: Do you *believe* this?
Message-ID:  <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B130336634B@nmrusdunsx1.nielsenmedia.com>

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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


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