Re: a DSSSL typesetter

[Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sebastian Rahtz said:
> 
> My gut feeling is that TeX (or better, its Unicode-using child, Omega)
> is *almost* able to deal with all the theoretical requirements of
> DSSSL, but I would not put money on it. Until someone writes a 
> DSSSL engine that implements the entire spec, its hard to find out.
> 
   Just for grins, let me throw out an idea that occurred to me some
time back.  Pardon me if this is a bit stupid or ill-conceived, but
has anyone ever thought of implementing TeX's functionality in
PostScript?  In other words, you could setup a simple Jade backend
which would write the stream of flow objects to a PostScript file, and
a standard set of PostScript routines would typeset those objects
directly, rather than having TeX output (via DVI->ps) a stream of
"stupid" PostScript code which just says "move here, draw this".
   Perhaps I'm oversimplifying here, and I mean no disrespect to what
TeX accomplishes, but it just seems that PostScript has all the
facilities to pull off what TeX does, and it would eliminate the extra
step of running TeX.  The two possible scenarios I see are to have the
actual rendering process (ie, the printer itself) run these routines,
or code the routines to simply write out a stream of "stupid"
PostScript code, much as TeX does.
   Has anything like this been thought of, attempted, or done?  Or am
I just completely off the wall here?

-Brandon :)


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