[geeks] How can people put up with this....

[dave at cca.org]

jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu writes:

>On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 01:15:23PM -0400, dave at cca.org wrote:

>> Well, the original problem is that Distiller doesn't understand
>> my postscript file. I've gotten around the problem by using ghostscript's
>> ps2pdf utility, which is *generally* far inferior to Distiller, but
>> did well in this case. (I had to rewrite a small section of the file
>> for ps2pdf to get it right, but that was a matter of five minutes.)

>Is distiller available on Unix now?  Or did you go buy a new machine.

No, Kinkos tries to use it when I bring in a PS file.

>> Now, instead of a 4K postscript file, I have a 600K PDF file that
>> I can't edit.

>No.  But you can edit the ps file, then regenerate.  There are always
>tradeoffs.  An ideal shop could handle it either way.

Yep.

>> It will work, but I still don't see this as "progress".

>Did your 4k PS file use any fonts?  I believe that font issues was the
>biggest cause of people pushing for PDF printing.

Neither file had fonts in it. Which wound up screwing things up on
the PDF version - there was some outlining that was rendered as
lines & curves, and some fonts that were just text - so the outlines
were for the fonts on my machine, and the text was done with their
fonts. Of course... their "Courier" was different enough from my
"Courier" to cause visible problems. Dammit. I have to figure out
how to make ghostscript's PDF generator include the fonts.

>> I'm experimenting with randomizing the edges of the type after it's
>> all laid out, to get a "hand printed" look to it. Tricky, but should
>> be worth the effort.

>Nifty.  I keep meaning to get really into writing postscript, but other
>than a simple task here or there, I'm not doing much.

I think the best way to learn postscript is to play with fractal
trees. They're *very* easy to do in postscript, then you can play
with the appearence in all sorts of neat ways (line thickness,
outlines, randomness, etc).

>How are you doing the randomizing?  Perlin noise, or "real" randomization?
>Also, are you using your own typeface, an off the shelf typeface, or
>just drawing the letter straight out as you go?  

There's a postscript operator, "pathforall" that goes through the
current graphical object you've defined, and lets you manipulate it.
I just lay out the text, but before actually rendering it, I walk 
through all the points and add a little variation to each location.
The main problem with this is that curves and lines get affected
drasticly differently. I'm going to have to convert the lines to
bezier curves before the randomization pass, I think. Still playing
with the idea.

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org -------
---------- "Anything Jesus can do, I can do better." - The Locust ----------