It would be nice to have a file format that is a combination of iges/dxf(accurate CAD data) and ps(good text/font capabilities). On a slightly related subject: For our shop floor drawings at work, I print the operation drawings off into *.pdf files. When the shop supervisor needs to run a job and needs a copy of the drawing, she just prints the *.pdf. It's nothing ground breaking, I know. But, at least there's something there to look at if our proprietary software goes belly up. Dan On 4/3/10 5:17 PM, Eric Wilhelm wrote: > # from Dan Falck > # on Saturday 03 April 2010 14:47: > > >> I often wondered how Postscript would do for this. >> > The .ps, .pdf, and .svg formats all suffer from a slightly weak curve > model (so you have to approximate splines) and a rather ad-hoc drawing > model (.ps is even a turing-complete programming language), which makes > it difficult to distinguish between a circle and and arc, and it's > possible to have arbitrarily complex "path" objects (containing > islands, may or may not be closed, etc.) > > There are some more elaborate options with fills, but this is > significantly different than hatching, and these formats place far more > emphasis on rendering/stroke than mathematical representation. There > is also no "dimension" object, leader lines, and some related concepts. > > That's all fine if you just want to print something or look at it, but > not so great for programmatically manipulating things, and probably > puts a kink in any kind of two-way relation or geometry generation. > > --Eric >