RE: Distiller Trivia

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Matthias,

Unfortunately, what you consider a "feature" others might
consider a severe liability. The "device independent" PostScript
you refer to is Level 1 PostScript, optimized for nothing and
unable to take advantage of features of particular PostScript
devices when the PostScript is destined for a real printing
device as opposed to the Distiller. Virtually all UNIX applications
have similarly poor support for output because there are no
real system-level facilities for generation of output page
description language from any internal graphics model.

Adobe has not "forgotten" about UNIX. We develop software for
whatever platforms can be justified by reasonable analysis of
costs and returns on investment. There is a TREMENDOUS fixed
overhead cost of developing, testing, marketing, and supporting
any particular software package on any particular OS platform.
That overhead is the same whether we have 10 customers or 100,000
customers for that application/platform combination.

One of the biggest problems with "UNIX" is there is no single
UNIX. This is a legacy of the famous AT&T versus BSD fights of
the early 1980s coupled with each UNIX system vendor differentiating
their systems into mutual incompatibility. (Years back, I managed
engineering organizations that did UNIX OS work as well as 
applications and utilities on top of UNIX systems. It was "ifdef Hell"!)
As such, each variant of UNIX must be considered as a totally
separate platform for purposes of analyzing costs and return on
investment. LINUX is another variant of UNIX, but with its own
variants dependent upon the supplier and what GUI and optional
features they bundle with their particular "distribution".

        - Dov


At 3/21/2002 12:13 AM, Matthias.Dillier@snb.ch wrote:
>Hi
>
>One more time this discussion but what about UNIX (or Linux)?
>When you use FM on UNIX, there you will have simple, deviceindependent
>PS-ouput which you can use to produce your PDF-files. No trouble with all
>this different drivers....
>The main problem there is, that Adobe seems to have forgotten, that there
>exist operating systems beside MS-Windows and Mac-OS. (FM started on
>UNIX-plattforms, but this seems to be a long time ago.)
>
>Regards,
>Matthias Dillier
>


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