tlug: Linux for publishing? (ZD Net story)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jdh" == John De Hoog <washi@example.com> writes:

    jdh> "Linux is a great desktop system, but it's not quite ready
    jdh> for print and prepress," said Michael Hammell, a Dallas-based
    jdh> software engineer and author of a forthcoming book on Linux
    jdh> graphics. The problem, Hammell said, is that the
    jdh> underpinnings of current graphics systems -- PostScript, PDF
    jdh> and color management systems -- are proprietary and not
    jdh> available as open-source code....

I can't speak to color management; that's fairly new wizardry and
probably the proprietary stuff is far more capable than any open
source stuff that might now exist.  However, PostScript (at least up
to 2.0) and PDF (AFAIK) are proprietary (owned by Adobe) but public
standards, and are fairly completely implemented by Ghostscript.  The
current release of Ghostscript is not GPL (releases are generally
reverted to GPL after a year to a year and a half) but AFAIK does
qualify as open source.

It is probably true that a full implementation of Postscript 3.0 and
PDF will not be available for some time in Ghostscript; Ghostscript is
developed for-profit but licensed in source for free use for
non-profit purposes.  Obviously that means that revenues are
consulting based and at the present time (based on oblique comments in
beta release READMEs) the client priorities are (1) direct support for
HPGL as a front end (ie, make your Epson look like a LJ6 to all
applications), (2) Display PostScript, and (3) certain optimizations.
Full Postscript-3.0 and PDF reading/writing are planned, but not
scheduled I believe.

I can't speak to the issue of whether Ghostscript is a satisfactory
implementation of Postscript for high-end publishing (in many betas
there are bad errors in painting code when new algorithms for
rasterization are tried or optimized, so I know those algorithms (a)
are fragile and (b) have a wide range of quality; in my experience
such errors have always resulted from code labelled as alpha-quality,
which does NOT get included in public releases, but I'm not a very
demanding user).  And of course the _fonts_ are proprietary in most
cases (nobody with access to Adobe fonts will use the free fonts
provided with Ghostscript), and maybe some of the "font master"
algorithms are also proprietary.

So I think that there may be an issue here that (serious) publishing
is simply too much of a niche and the work is too hard to be
well-supported in open source software.  Could happen, but I think
it's far more likely that proprietary software will be developed for/
ported to the Linux platform.

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