Subject: bug#7786: 23.2; Encoding of PostScript files

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2021 15:47:26 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> PostScript is (was?) meant to produce good looking text
>> print-outs. Therefore it uses typographical quotes instead of those
>> from ASCII. This design decision should be honoured.

My screenshot showed that the actual output used proper typographical
quotes, but that may be down to the font used.

> So why a2ps doesn't?

I think the conclusion here is that we shouldn't do anything.  Adobe
created two encodings -- the "standard" one (which is ASCII with some
alterations), and the ISOLatin1Encoding (which is 8859-1 with some
alterations).  But we can't really detect these simply: a2ps, for
instance, uses 8859-1 instead,

%%BeginResource: encoding ISO-8859-1Encoding

enscript does the same, but in a different way:

%%BeginResource: procset Enscript-Encoding-88591 1.6.5 90

None of the .ps files I can find on this laptop uses ISOLatin1Encoding
(or the "standard encoding"), as far as I can see.

So 1) these encodings went out of fashion decades ago and, 2) even if we
wanted to support them, Emacs can't auto-detect when they're used.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no