[PDF's]
Whether you wrote the PS by hand or generated it from another
source, you have the PS. I want it. But you don't give it to me
and instead apply an irreversible transformation to it.
I'm all for keeping documents in their original source. And
postscript is nominally human-readable source. (Although much
machine generated postscript is garbage.)
But there are great tools for dealing with PDF's at a very human-
grokkable abstraction, both in creation and in picking-them-apart.
My favorite is the CPAN module PDF::API2, which is a joy to use.
It is certainly a lot more fun to pick apart machine-generated PDF
with PDF::API2 than to pick apart machine-generated postscript using
any tool.
For those on the "document front", you gotta see SVG. It's way
more fun than either postscript of PDF, and those are a gas to play
with on their own. Take the best of HTML/the web, the best of postscript,
and the best of Java and the best of XML, and you have SVG. (I do admit
that I still despise HTML, Java, and XML as they stand alone. It's their
combination in SVG that really rocks!)
Tim.
