Re: postscript vs PDF, Call for Community Feedback: Retiring IETF FTP Service

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Saturday, November 28, 2020 15:17 -0500 John Levine
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> In article <9E191D6ECFE4BC432E78DEE7@PSB> you write:
>> RFCs that were available in machine-readable form a few years
>> later, you would have to retrieve Postscript files and render
>> them.  I don't have any idea how stable Postscript rendering
>> mechanisms (and their supposed clones) were over time and
>> across devices or whether they were "improved" enough to make
>> assuming they represented what the author intended
>> questionable.
> 
> Postscript has always been well defined, in the original Adobe
> reference in 1985 and then the much expanded one in 1990.  Some
> of the PS RFCs may have depended on non-standard fonts but
> that all seems to be sorted out in the PDFs created from them.
> 
> I looked at a few of the first PS RFCs from 1989 in the viewer
> on my Mac and they all look fine.

Good to know and not surprising... but "looks fine" is not
necessarily sufficient to satisfy Tim's criterion of "intent of
the author".  My personal guess is that particular criterion
--at least as I, and I think Rich, interpreted it is basically
impossible.  So the key question is whether Tim intended that in
a way that is plausible and can be better defined or whether we
can (and should) just move on.

   john

> 
> R's,
> John
>