RE: Best document formatting language

Hi James,

James Rich wrote:

> Our fax solution is also hylafax on linux, and it works wonderfully.

Yes it's a very good solution. We use it over 2 years now in our PC
network. 
And since last month I interfaced our 400 via FTP to Hylafax.

> Because we want to email, print, and fax documents, our 
> choice has been to use postscript.  We have postscript 
> printers which are cheaper than IPDS printers.  Postscript 
> converts easily to pdf.  For email we have an out queue 
> connected to lp5250d (from the tn5250 project) which converts 
> postscript to pdf on the fly.  The resulting pdf is placed on 
> our file server for easy attachment to email.  And of course 
> hylafax faxes postscript documents with ease, so no troubles there.

I'm very curious how that conversion works! Can you give an example?

> We don't have much demand to view printed output in a web 
> browser, so html has not been a consideration.  If it were, 
> we would probably just convert the postscript to pdf as pdf 
> viewers are cheap and plentiful.
> 
> Writing postscript files is more work than AFPDS but very 
> well worth it in my opinion.  The hardware is cheaper, you 
> have more choice of hardware, and the resulting output looks 
> much nicer.  As well, postscript is a programming language in 
> its own right, so it is quite powerful.  As well, there are 
> many, many postscript post- and pre-processors that you can 
> use to do things you can't do with afpds, such as printing 
> "SAMPLE" underneath the text on every page.  I also prefer 
> the development process of postscript better than AFPDS.  By 
> that I mean I can edit the postscript file with a plain text 
> editor and see the results immediately using ghostscript, 
> whereas with AFPDS I have to create the overlay in one 
> progam, then import it, then run the print program that 
> creates the spooled file, then print the spooled file.  Way 
> too much work and wasted paper when you are trying to get 
> thing to line up just perfect.
> 
> I have been working with postscript output and hylafax a lot 
> recently. 
> I've designed my print programs such that the coding for 
> postscript is very similar to the way one would code a 
> regular external printfile.  If you have any questions at all 
> feel free to ask me - it is all on my brain lately :)
> 

At this moment I have not any experience with PS other than what I
readed about it last night.
So I don't have criteria to decide if it is worth to learn postscript.
I would be very happy if you would be so kind to share some examples.
What you and Rich Duzenbury are telling me sounds as good way to go.

Thanks a lot,
Arco Simonse

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