9fans archive / 2001 / 02 / 381 /    prev next

From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" <gwyn@arl...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: psutils et al
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 09:58:55 GMT

"John A. Murdie" wrote:
> Thanks, this is interesting. So, if I am writing an application
> program for Plan 9 which requires to print graphical output,
> what document description language do I use? I think I'd probably
> write pic/eqn/tbl etc. Is that your solution too?

Yes, indeed there are other preprocessors such as chem, grap, dot,
etc. that produce pic-language output (and sometimes other formats).
Pic makes a fairly good diagram description language.

> Where then should one do any N-upping, page rotation etc that is
> required, ...

There should be no problem using PostScript-oriented tools so long
as you have decent (Adobe document structure conforming) Postscript
files, which can be produced from ditroff among other things.  What
I think people were complaining about was (1) they don't have good
ports of decent PostScript tools, and (2) some pre-existing
PostScript files, for example those produced by some methods of
using Microsoft Office applications, are badly formatted.  But (2)
should not be an issue when you have control over the generation
of the original PostScript files.

> What should the Plan 9 solution be?

Presumably make some sort of file system :-)