At 09:37 +0000 1998/12/18, David Carlisle wrote:
>   I think this is the problem: People in the publishing industry buys all the
>   expensive Adobe licenced PS/PDF stuff and then only works with that,
>   because they have the money and do not want to risk incompatibilities. The
>   others are left out in the cold.
...
>The problem with this argumemt is that the software that Berthold was
>referring to was acrobat reader and the windows gdi printing system.
>The first is free, the second is not, but I would not say that someone
>with a windows box was necessarily classed as rich.

Incompatibilities show up, for example, when tries to use a system not
using PS (say in the OS  in the printer): I used an Apple MacOS system
based entirely on Quickdraw (introduced by Apple in order to avoid Adobe
license fees), and the within that system converted DVI files to PDF, and
it did not work out -- for some reason, the PS CM fonts did not convert as
expected. (That is, the PDF files created were unusable within Acrobat
Reader, for some reason I do not know.)

So those problems do exist, that I am sure of.

So I realized that the safest thing is to stick to this PS stuff entirely.
I also know that this is what they do in the graphics industry here in
Sweden: A typical setup might be a Mac with PS, using PageMaker and PS
printers all the way, and other things they know that others typically use.
This way one avoids incompatibilities. Other formats (like MS Word), one
tries convert into this PS setup, before working it. So this is like a
small niche scientific community, always using TeX and DVI.

  Hans Aberg
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