1000 GUI toolkits

[William Tanksley]

On 2 Mar 2000 22:05:01 GMT, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
>In article <38BECF1A.D6E247F7 at magellan.umontreal.ca>, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>>Well, PostScript is a programming language which degenerated to a file format.
>>It was used heavily in the NeWS windowing system. I can easily imagine PDF to
>>do the same.

Eh?  Do the same?  It can't -- PDF is a page description file format.  You
might mean "do the reverse" (change from a file format to a language), but
I suspect that's unlikely -- Apple bought NeXT, which already used
DisplayPostscript.  If they wanted a language they could have used that.

Personally, I think using a language for page description is a bad idea
(in general).

>This is true.  I have a question though -- why is PDF being used for the
>display subsystem, and not Postscript?  The rationale for the decision seems
>unclear to me.

Because PDF simply describes the picture, rather than providing a program
to render it.  It therefore takes less resources, and components of the
picture can be manipulated by programs much more easily.  It's not
possible in general to, for example, select a few lines from an arbitrary
postscript image, move them to the left, and save the result.  At least
not without recreating the entire Postscript file.

>Perhaps if I knew more about the decisions behind the change, I'd get a
>larger grasp of the big picture, and could change my opinions. :)

Sam changing his opinions?  Naw.  ;)

>KC5TJA/6, DM13, QRP-L #1447

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley, in hoc signo hack