CompuServe Messages

Craig PostScript is _not_ inefficient for what it is doing … because it is a programming language … but for outputting text, it can appear very inefficient. Depending on the complexity of the docuemnt, especially how much the tracking, kerning or whatever is altered as you may find that every single character will consist of something like: 144.3548 3324.4435 moveto (a) show At least most PostScript output knowck some of this on the head by creating a special routine to simplify the above … which might run something like: 3324.4435 (a) ms Even so, each single character (or word, or section of text), gets expanded … and there's a lot of additional stuff too … hence, PostScript looks inefficient varying from about 40:1 to 4:1. Bit-images can also appear quite inefficient … although they're much more efficient (in percentage overhead) than text. A simple "one-plane" bit image may be broken into 8-pixel bytes … and these are sent as hex characters, therefore doubling the character count (2:1) … gray scale images are much the same, each pixel may be represented by a single byte (again, as hex) and so it still remains at 2:1 Mike (Whapping from the UK)