Postscript printer question

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 07:52:40PM -0500, Tim Writer wrote:
> The PostScript Red Book has this to say:
> 
>     A hexadecimal string consists of a sequence of hexadecimal
>     digits (09 and either AF or af) enclosed within < and >. Each
>     pair of hexadecimal digits defines one character of the
>     string. White-space characters are ignored. If a hexadecimal
>     string contains characters outside the allowed character set,
>     a syntaxerror occurs.  Hexadecimal strings are useful for
>     including arbitrary binary data as literal text.
> 
> So, while this is legal behaviour on the part of OOo, I would argue that it
> departs from the intent as your example uses plain text.
> 
> In case you decide to implement a scanner, be aware of this:
> 
>     If the final digit of a given hexadecimal string is missing in
>     other words, if there is an odd number of digits, the final
>     digit is assumed to be 0. For example, <901fa3> is a
>     3-character string containing the characters whose hexadecimal
>     codes are 90, 1f, and a3, but <901fa> is a 3-character string
>     containing the characters whose hexadecimal codes are 90, 1f,
>     and a0.
> 
> There's no reason for OOo to escape ~ as, according to the Red Book, only
> (, ), <, >, [, ], {, }, /, and % are special. Having said that, PostScript
> uses <~ and ~> as delimiters for base 85 strings.

Well it just appears that OOo has implemented things as 'encode
everything as hex'.  It isn't just escaping ~, it is escaping
everything.  I suspect it really is just a case of doing one thing for
everything rather than having a special case for ascii characters.

> It could be as simple as playing with your LANG or LOCALE environment
> variables.

I doubt it.  I tend to run with LANG=C and usually no LOCALE setting.

Len Sorensen
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