I should have pointed out that on a Macintosh connected to a Postscript
printer all one needs to do to *print* a Postscript file is to drag the
file's icon to the printer icon and drop it. Viewing a Postscript file
on the screen was the task in question in my previous post. .pdf files
are much smaller than Postscript files, and if one wishes to save them
(though I can't think why one would want to do that - bookmarks to the
files on the Los Alamos server are easier to save) then I think .pdf is
the way to go. Acrobat Exchange, complete with Distiller (for viewing
and converting Postscript files) and an OCR program and other stuff is
sold at an academic price of C$54 ~= US$37. It permits one to make any
document which can be printed from a Macintosh, made by any application
at all, into a .pdf. The Mac OS already has the capability to produce a
Postscript file without purchasing another application, by the way, and
has had that capability for many years.
I won't get into a religious discussion here, but I spent 8-1/2 months
in a laboratory where the only operating system was unix. Even the PCs
there spoke Linux, and the only Macintosh was an old SE which I never
saw turned on - I don't remember what its putative function was
supposed to have been. Of course I adjusted and got along fine, but the
period of Maclessness was ended when I returned to Canada and my usual
all Mac environment. The only thing I really missed on unix was
Ghostview (or Ghostscript - I can never remember which is which). The
Macintosh environment suits me very well, and I notice that PCs are
moving, if slowly, toward an OS more like the Mac OS than X-windows. I
am glad I don't have to wait until Bill Gates emulates System 8. I can
afford the more comfortable machine now; that's why I use it. There are
no shortcomings I know of once the price issue is set aside. There does
seem to be a large number of misconceptions about the Macintosh among
nonusers, however.