Re: vulnerabilities of postscript printers

[Darren Reed <avalon () caligula anu edu au>]

In some mail from Elizabeth Zwicky, sie said:
> > I've never heard of anyone suggesting you could copy data
> > from one port to another, if only because there's no such thing as an
> > open file in postscript.
>
> Sure there is. PostScript has all the standard file handling, among
> other things for handling peripherals for font storage.
[...]
> > Of course if you had a postscript printer AND a the postscript cookbooks
> > you'd instantly get a better understanding.
>
> Umm, apparently not. Although the PostScript manuals are handy, you
> need to dig pretty deep into them to get to relatively little-used
> commands.

Mea culpa.

I'd always believed font handling was just done "special" :)

Both the "Red book" and "Blue book" are available online and to my
surprise there is "open", "read", "write" and "close".  A quick skip
through to the command index shows they're there.

Btw, someone else mentioned something to the effect that hard drives
were "new" to printers.  Hard drives have been in printers for ~10 years
(if not more) where you needed 100MB or so of space to spool print jobs.

Darren