Geschke: No, PostScript was the name that we picked shortly after we started
our business.
Livingston: Did you use the same ideas that were in Interpress?
Geschke: There were several things that weren’t done in Interpress. It wasn’t
really a programming language the way PostScript was; it was a little more
static. And in the design of Interpress, we never were able to figure out how to
deal with type. In the world before Adobe, the presumption was that to get
high-quality type at laser printer resolutions, let alone ink jet resolutions, you
would have to hand-tune bitmaps for every type style and every point size.
Extremely labor intensive. Also, what would look good on a laser printer
wouldn’t necessarily look good on an ink jet printer and probably not look at all
good on a computer screen. So in fact you not only had to design for different
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point sizes and different typefaces, but you had to design for different imaging
devices. If you begin doing all that multiplication, you could hire all of the hightech
workers in China and not keep up. It wasn’t going to work.
Livingston: So you created scalable fonts?
Geschke: We came up with the idea of using a pure mathematical description
of the outline of the type and then worked on some sophisticated algorithms
about how to decide which bits to turn on and which ones not to turn on to give
the highest-quality rendering on the particular device. That was really the
breakthrough technology that differentiated PostScript from anything that preceded
it, including Interpress.
Livingston: When you were working on Interpress, what were some of the big
ideas that you couldn’t believe that Xerox didn’t appreciate?
Geschke: At a conceptual level, it was the same idea as PostScript. From any
computer running any kind of application software, you could, over the network,
interface to any printer at any resolution, any characteristics, and be guaranteed
that the file would transport between the two. For a company that’s in the printing
business, such as Xerox, that meant they only had to provide a single digital
interface on the front end and they could connect to anything. The converse
was also true for software writers, because they could print to this PostScript
string and it would look good on any PostScript printer. And the same was true
for platform vendors like Apple and Microsoft: they only had to write one print
driver to be able to generate output for any PostScript device—or would have
for a Xerox device running Interpress.

Похожие записи:

• Geschke: No, PostScript