CompuServe Messages

Japanese Postscript

    21-Oct-88 13:25:28
Fm: Stephen H. Owades 72477,3350
To: NORIO FURUYA 76615,2746
At the Seybold Seminar last month, John Warnock (president of Adobe Systems) spoke briefly about Japanese (Kanji) PostScript. Apparently they are extending the PostScript language to provide additional features for Kanji. Although these extensions will be available for downloading to current PostScript printers, output will be much faster if a machine incorporating the new capabilities is used. This question is in addition to the font issue, which is of course a complex one due to the size of the alphabet. I visited Adobe after the seminar and found the type department actively engaged in creating Kanji characters, so that work is certainly progressing. There is some talk of creating "extensible" fonts so that the special characters needed by individual users could be added to the "basic" character set to be provided by Adobe. Before buying current-generation PostScript printers like the QMS or Apple models for your Japanese-language application, I would contact Adobe and the Japanese home-market licensed manufacturers of PostScript printers for more details on the Kanji extensions.