CompuServe Messages

Hi, David – To paraphrase a classic office saying: How is the Apple/Microsoft PDL agreement like elephants mating? 1. It is done on a high level between great beasts. 2. There is much bellowing and trumpeting. 3. It takes a year to get results. Frankly, regardless of the number of RIP vendors announcing that they will support the new standard, it is still vaporware as far as the user community is concerned. That's great if Hyphen is already interpreting Royal fonts, but there's more to a PDL than fonts, and Microsoft's contribution here is still hard to assess either in terms of results, current progress, or remaining development effort. The recentness of the coalition announcement revealed – at least to me – that both MS and Apple didn't have complete solutions on their own. Also, it's going to take time for the two firms' development teams to synchronize efforts. Another related favorite classic is, "It is not possible to hire 9 women to produce a baby in one month." Unless there are some Jokers hiding in this particular deck, the critical path is at least 8 months long due to staff/vendor/developer communications alone. Now I'm _fairly_ sure that I didn't sleep through all three years of calculus classes (despite what my professors may claim…), but quadratics are 10-20% more compute-intensive then Beziers. Also, I programmed quadratic curve routines for NASA some 17 years ago in machine language, so there is a little rationale for the delusion that I might know something about this mess. Now this may sound too, too simple, but – what problem does this proposed joint PDL solve? Performance? Naw – they'll have the same hurdles to overcome, and the clone shops are supposed to have 120 page/minute capability now, anyway. Screen display quality? Uh uh – ATM fixes that, and Display PostScript certainly works well on other platforms. Enriched features? Nope – I wouldn't be surprised if it had fewer features. Adobe's large market share? Bingo! – this PDL venture is purely a predatory move which would do justice to IBM's gorilla tactics of the [continued in reply]