OT: Ghostscript, won't install

Yep, nor it that all that typical of Linux today. I haven't built a Linux program from source in like a decade. Plus i like having a command line interface as well.

Actually they were competitive from a total cost of ownership orientation. By the time you had a set of useful set of (SW) tools on a PC it cost more to much more than what you could have an equivalent on the early MAC. If they had pushed it in that way we might have ended up with a more nearly 50/50 split to even Mac dominated game today. The other difference was open architecture vs closed architecture. Apple finally learned that one as well.

Indeed, it won't happen at all.

(including

Nah. The European R&D part of our company closed in summer 1989. So I had to start self-employed much earlier than I thought. This meant, predominantly, that I really had to watch overhead and expenses. The PC I bought was a very sturdy industrial version, I wanted to make sure it would be robust. And it was, but expensive. The software OTOH was dirt cheap. I bought:

a. MS-Works. All of $109. This did (and still does) all my business book keeping, parts inventory, tracking, statistics, EE calcs, and whatever else coomes to mind. initially also work processing.

b. OrCad-SDT. this cost me $495. The best CAD there ever was. Unfortunately that can IMHO no longer be said since the company was bought so I ditched Orcad. Switched to Eagle, and lo and behold despite being more 20 years later it cost less.

c. Numerous engineering programs. A beamfield simulator from Sweden for about $50, filter calc SW from a university for around $30, other things came with books and were free to use even commercially if you paid for the book. You just had to be somewhat multi-lingual because some SW talked Swedish on occasion, other SW French, et cetera.

That concludes my start-up SW expenses back then.

d. Sometime in 91 or 92 I bought MS-Word 5.0 for DOS. Much more powerful to generate very large module specs and publications with TOC, footnotes, index and all that. To this day there is nothing from new word processors that I'd be missing if you'd put me back into my old

AFAIR things such as Orcad weren't even available for a Mac, the engineering software under "c." definitely wasn't. That alone made the Mac a non-starter for me. Later I also bought SPICE which cost money. And that, I believe, would have been available for Apples but same cost. However, I needed all this software to run, not just some of it. Only a PC could do that.

They learned it way, way too late.

You may well be right; plus it has a head on competitor scribus.

So ... I have Foxit installed. Opens PDFs pretty darn fast but the rendering of text is a bit fuzzier than Acrobat. Almost as if I didn't have my glasses on. For example this datasheet:

Both are significant virtues.

Latex also has the not insignificant virtue of doing a much nicer job of composing the text than does the usual WYSIWYG word processor.

If only it was easier to install new typefaces. I have some nice Adobe Type 1 faces, with their expert sets, that I'd really like to use but it has been frustrating (and not particularly productive) trying to get them properly recognized for DVI and PDF output. *Aldus* is the body face, *Palatino* is really a display face but noooooo...

Go to Tools->Preferences->Page Display and try toggling the "Display texts optimized for LCD screen" option?

I tried that but while it made the letters a bit more bold there is still the same type of "fuzz" on characters even if you zoom them way up.

It's not that it's a show-stopper, just not quite as good.

Hmm... I took a look and... yeah, I hadn't noticed it before, and you're right (it's a very small difference on my machine, but certainly visible if you're looking for it). I guess Acrobat's Edit->Preferences->Smoothing really does do something useful!

How big is and what's the resolution of your LCD? I'm suspecting this is more noticeable on smaller/lower-resolution displays...

---Joel

OrCAD crashes on me at least one a day. The newest version of FireFox is junk too. :-(

It's a pig.

I may use V4 if I still had it. No reason to, though. There are many better solutions.

Yes, I think Adobe certainly has some very capable folks on their team who know image processing rather well. I am just not very enthused with the quality of Acrobat. I mean, this is their product that everyone is familiar with so it acts like a portal, to entice folks to buy some of their stuff. If I'd be doling out freebies of my products I'd do my darndest to make them bullet-proof.

It's a different matter with shareware, open source or "pay if you like us" ware. Like GSView which IMHO has a rather clumsy GUI. But it's a company that seems to run on a shoestring budget and lets people use it for free. Ghostgum doesn't seem to offer much that can generate follow-up revenue for them.

Geesh! You never notice a smiley or wink. It was a joke, son! I say, a joke! :(

You've said the same thing about Thunderbird, Netscape and several other programs.

V3 and to a large extent V4 were quite good. Then it became progressively worse.

But that's also the case for others. For example MS-Works, a fairly simple program, became heavily bloated after V6. It doesn't crash but screws up rather mundane jobs such as copy&paste at random. So, the usual: One has to load older versions because they work.

Bloat appears to be the root cause of software quality issues.

Stock up on big CRTs now from Craiglist? Smaller ones are usually free these days, and I doubt anyone has sold a used 21" CRT for more than $100 in years now... :-)

Damn! Made me look :-) Discovered that Acrobat v7 will convert PDF's to _10_ other graphical formats !! ...Jim Thompson

I went to 1280*1024 ViewSonic when I could no longer move the 21" tube monitor by myself :-) ...Jim Thompson

The later versions of Netscape were a pain in the neck but I ditched that many, many moons ago. Thunderbird doesn't crash, usually.

For me the best quality web browser ever was Mosaic.

When switching to another brand of software for CAD or anything else makes the crashes completely go away that leaves only one obvious conclusion, doesn't it?

Thought about that but I am married and part of the "his" walk-in closet is occupied with "hers" :-)