On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Eric Ryan wrote:

>  w3, the www standards body, is pushing a vector graphics language.
> A couple of excerpts from: http://www.w3.org/Press/1999/SVG-WD

Nice.  I particularly like the part:  "Cooperation Ensures Ubiquity"
Makes me feel better in the face of:  "Resistence is Futile"

> Adobe is the company that makes the language used in most laser printers.
> So, we don't need to get squeak on printers - we only need to be
> compatible with SVG.  Plus, it would aid exhanging info with all those
> companies. 
>   Since SVG doesn't exist yet, there isn't much point worrying about it
> now.

And Microsoft makes the language that is used on most destop computers.
We dont need to get Squeak on printers, but right now, Squeak exists 
primarily on desktop machines, with PDA's coming in second.  I was just
identifying printers as an interesting class of computers that *already*
use a VM approach, that would be interesting to have Squeak on. 

I have no idea of how easy it is to reprogram a printer (or a PDA, for that
matter). If one wants to print, one can always emit some description of the
image (even if it is just simple text), and send that description to the 
printer.  But this doesn't get you WYSIWYG printing, and is no help in 
exploring alternate rasterization models/mechanisms.

Printing on NeXTSTEP was very nice... you used display Postscript for the 
screen, and if you had a NeXT Printer, it didn't even need it's own CPU,
since the Postscript was already in the destop machine. The only down-side
was having to program (a bit) in Postscript. 

Think of printing as a distributed objects problem.  A bitmap is the 
lowest-level form of communication. There  is no substitute for having 
the same imaging model in both places.  More abstractly, there is no
substitute for having the same *model* in more than one place. 
Trying do do distributed computation between different platforms is
much harder and always results in lost fidelity.

The whole idea of the VM approach is to present an idealized, uniform
support layer for software, regardless of how annoying the underlying
layers may be.

-- Mike Klein

P.S. I suppose I should say that there really is nothing wrong with
just sending a bitmap to the printer, and doing all of the rasterization
in your Smalltalk image.  This is the only way I could ever get pretty
pictures out of smalltalk (VW).  It works quite nicely, actually.  Since 
printing is almost always done locally, burn the bandwidth!

> On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Ranjan Bagchi wrote:
> 
> > > "Michael S. Klein" wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Another posibility for printing would be to port Squeak to a printer
> > > > platform.  They are already supporting Postscript VM's. This seems
> > > > to be a squeaky-clean way to get a portable imaging model.
> > >
> > > Go ahead and persuade HP to do that...
> > 
> > On the other hand, a squeaky front end to ghostscript'd do the job nicely,
> > I'd think.
> > 
> > -rj

Does ghostscript run on any printers?  Or is this just another way of
generating a bitmap to send to the laser printer.