PostScript

[[deleted user]]

I never gave much thought to PostScript before, so this chapter was eye-opening for me. I was impressed with the blend between elegance and pragmatism in this solution. I also knew nothing of the language's history, but I am not surprised that it is yet another Xerox PARC innovation. The PARC history discussion itself was fascinating, yet I mourn the loss of the days of heavy DARPA engineering student funding and heavy industrial research done by the Xeroxs, IBMs, and AT&Ts that led to so many other innovations and so much technical education.

[Erik]

I liked the section describing the difference between Managers and Leaders. There isn't too much discussion regarding career paths in the book, but this section gets close to that a little bit.

I've worked with some Optical Character Recognition recently that gave me a perspective on this chapter that I wouldn't have had 6 months ago. The section about handling fonts, foreign character sets, etc... was interesting to me for this reason. It's on about page 403. I used to only think of languages as code pages and encoding.