Re: PS vs. PDF

[Jeff Kingston]

Franck Arnaud wrote:

> Is there anything in the PDF subset of postscript that
> prevents doing the Lout diagrams or is it just harder to do
> in that subset?

It is impossible to implement the current @Diag and @Graph
packages using any combination of Lout + PDF.  This is
because these packages are based on extensive PostScript
routines which cannot be implemented in either Lout or PDF
owing to the fact that neither of those languages is a
general programming language (which PostScript is).

Any attempt to redo the @Diag and @Graph packages in a form
that would allow Lout + PDF to implement them would dumb
down those packages so far as to make them entirely useless.

It is undoubtedly a deficiency of Lout that this should be
the case - as a document formatting language you would
expect Lout to contain features that would support the
translation of high-level specifications of diagrams and
graphs into low-level formatting instructions.  But the
sad fact is that I decided many years ago to leave
graphics to PostScript.  I probably could not have brought
Lout to the point it is now if I had not taken that
shortcut.

Jeff