I'd like to write what I think of the "graphics design crowd", but my mind is boiling and I can't seem to find the right arrotment of derogatory adjectives right now. Fernando Cassia
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Well, when you find your calm center please do write about the graphic design crowd.
As I dragged my portfolio around, I used to do `cold calls'. It takes a lot of guts, and a strong stomach for rejection. But the good part about it is you get to see the inside of the place and if lucky you meet people and get a feel for how they run their business. It's an interesting way figure out what's happening. Some places felt like they would be good places to work, and others felt like they would be nightmares.
San Francisco in the early 90s was in a wide open war of all against all. Every design agency, studio, and shop was going wild feeding the Dot.Com boom. I had walked into a design war zone.
``Why do we care about graphic design types anyway?''
Because I wanted to get into the field and out of the wheelchair shop. Also it is an opportunity to make people's visual world more pleasant and enjoyable to live in.
``Java HTML? That doesn't exist. There's Java (Java ME for Mobile platforms, Java SE for desktop GUI apps, Java EE for server-side multi-tier applications). "Java HTML" I've never heard of ''
True, Java HTML doesn't exist. It was just my short hand. As you may know Sun has changed their name for java about fifteen times. The names you used above are the current incarnations. Sun has a name fetish of some sort. The java I was using was called JDK 1.1.2. The exercises in the book used html to evoke a browser window and then run the java applet in the window.
It was a lot more fun than handwriting out a Fortran program and then using the punch card machine, one line, one card at a time.
``Nobody "codes" in Postsciprt anyway.''
Yes they most certainly do. That's what the font wars were about, dodging Adobe's license requirements to use PS in commercial production. The printers you mentioned have a central processor that is specially designed to compile the PS code (either hand coded or machine generated by a print driver). The compiled code is then turned into machine language to run the printer's electro-mechanical imaging and printing system.
There was an old joke among the PC graphic design crowd that said, we have our Mac's, only we call them, printers. The reason the joke was funny was that postscript print engines use the same Motorola processor as the Mac's did back then.
Concerning the font. Each letter is a shape, drawn inside a box. That letter and its box was originally designed by a typeface designer. Adobe bought out the older typefaces from the printing industry companies like Linotype and converted these designs into a digital format by using the PS language. So every letter and its box is a hand coded PS program. An entire typeface contains all the letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case, the punctuation marks, ligatures, along with italic and small caps. The typeface set represents an entire system of PS program modules that are a designed and proportioned system.
Some of these faces are nicer looking than others. The reason why is that the box and the letter shape are proportioned differently. Some design module are `nicer' looking than others. Of course taste in these matters varies.
For those interested, here is an introduction to PS programming:
http://www.tailrecursive.org/postscript/drawing.html
The way I got into thinking about computer printers and programming for them, was trying to design a math typeface. Back then (88-92) there were no consumer affordable PS printers. I had an IBM dot matrix printer. IBM had a little booklet that explained how to program letter shapes for this matrix. I thought I could hand design the missing math symbols like /\ or \/, and substitute them for the bad looking ASCII equivalents.
After struggling with this problem of trying to write equations with proper symbols I discovered a whole other end of the computer world. It started with PS, then led to unix systems, and then math and physical science journals, the AMS and then TeX.
When I got my first postscript printer it cost 3500 dollars and my damned Windows PC print drivers were broken. This led back into the font wars in a vicious cycle. I started out writing PS code as an ascii file and sending it to the printer and followed various PS tutorials.
Finally in the word processor wars between WordPerfect and MS Word, the print drivers got patched enough so you could actually write equations inside a word processor and usually get them to look okay on a PS printer. If I had been on a unix system none of this would have been the struggle it was.
I was still stuck in the PC Microsoft world. I had to write a friend's PhD thesis in Biophysics with a whole math section using WordPerfect. It was a nightmare. A few years later when I switched to FreeBSD and TeX, I just laughed. His thesis project would have been simple to write in that environment. Mark it up in TeX and send it off to the printer. It would have been simple in the unix and TeX environment because the environment, or platform was designed to produce those kinds of documents. The Microsoft world was designed to produce business letters, typed by overworked secretary pools.
Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX had come across the same problem I had, only years earlier and had created a whole typesetting system to deal with writing equations. It is a very beautiful system, right down to the classical proportions of the math symbols it generates.
I use it mostly for formatting a personal journal. You can use TeX or LaTeX as a simple page layout system in combination with Emacs as the text editor and design a whole book. In my opinion this is a faster and easier to use system than using Framemaker or Quark, and it is of course free. Most of the graphic design world that I came across knew nothing about these systems.
The whole publishing world is still struggling over this idiotic division between math, physics journal file formats and the rest of the journal world. There is some compromise ground using Adobe controlled PDF file formats.
So, then getting back to Bowman v. Google, the above was part of the iceberg of issues that seemed to me to be below the surface of Bowman v. Google case.
CG