miscellaneous

[Jeff Kingston]

(1) One person commented that omitting page
    breaks altogether would be a good thing
    in ASCII output.  The beauty of Lout is
    that the concept of a page is not built
    in, so this kind of thing is easy to do.

(2) Conversion from Lout to SGML or from
    SGML to Lout is not document formatting
    as such; the conversion just means
    changing syntax without needing to
    understand what the syntax means.

(3) A non-PostScript back end is possible
    but one has to deal with the fonts
    going in as well as the graphics
    coming out.  This is all in one module
    for the output and one for the fonts.
    I don't like the @LineStroke idea one
    little bit, it amounts to defining
    one's own graphics language to replace
    PostScript, a bit like expecting a
    compiler writer to define an assembly
    language.

I'll probably regret saying this next bit, but
why doesn't everyone just buy a PostScript
printer?  It's a brilliant language and they
deserve every penny of the gigantic royalties
I gather they cream off.  Have a look at the
Fig package that comes with Lout and just
consider how much of its power comes from
the flexibility and the features of PostScript.
There is so much nore to graphics rendering
than "draw a line from here to here", sometimes
I think people don't understand what a global
treasure PostScript is.

Jeff Kingston.