Re: PostScript verses PDF
I'm a bit foreign here; I've been working for a press manufacturer for the past ten years, but I came from another industry. In that other life, I used PostScript to generate reports from a database and loved it, so I jumped at the chance to go to work for one of the 'big boys.' I now work in our Service Department, often helping customers with prepress problems they encounter sending CIP3- (and soon, CIP4-) formatted files to our equipment. Being a PostScript programmer has helped me immensely when looking inside CIP3files; I have been able to customize some of our equipment to accommodate customer requirements because of this understanding.
That isn't PostScript programming, however; it's just diddling files that contains PostScript code. Our equipment uses custom-written code that parses the CIP3files, and I'm willing to bet that man-years of blood, sweat, and tears went into its construction. What puzzled me is why we didn't just license a PostScript package (or use an open-source one, like Ghostscript) and write our code in PostScript. The whole task would have been a lot easier, the tools would have been more reliable and compact (not necessarily faster, but possibly so), and the package more portable. I suspect that it isn't just us, either; from talking to technical folks from various vendors, it was clear I was not speaking with folks who knew PostScript, which makes me wonder if +anybody+ uses PostScript for CIP3.
I suppose this is all re-hashing old history; I didn't realize until reading this thread that PostScript had become legacy. That's too bad, because it's a powerful tool. As Thomas notes, most of the bloat in your average PostScript file is put in there by the author of some printer driver who want to cover all bases; PostScript is as capable of elegant code as any other programming language, and has the additional benefit of being a page-description language. It belongs in the toolchain, not the trash heap!