Re: Announcement: free Lua 4 Quick Reference booklet

[Bennett Todd <bet@...>]

2003-03-20T20:17:33 K. H. Man:
> I am looking into a rather wacko idea -- writing the booklet
> sources in PS.

PostScript is a pretty low-level language for composing a document,
but if you do it the results will be dead sexy.

A reasonably harmonious compromise is to use whatever tool makes you
comfortable to compose the doc, and render it with a good powerful
typesetter --- I've tended to use TeX for this, but Lout might be
easier. I've done booklets this way before, and to my tastes the
easiest way to handle it is to render to straightforward Postscript,
then use one of the postscript whacking tools like mpage or psutils
to mutate the PostScript into whatever booklet printing arrangement
works best for your printer. The key to making this pretty and
efficient is to make sure your rendered PostScript is using
PostScript's builtin scalable fonts, not some embedded pre-rendered
rasters.

Now that I think about it, I'd recommend you take a look at Lout
before trying to do this in pure PostScript; you might find it's
"close enough" to give you the control you want, while being much
easier to compose and therefore to maintain.

-Bennett

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