Application/postscript is, by definition, not text. On the other hand,
it clearly IS pretty much text encoded on most systems. This lead to
a minor question about newlines. Different platforms use different
conventions for newline, so how is the lowly app/post-generating UA
to know what to do? Must they be a full-fledged ps parser? Do we
require conversion to a canonical newline?
I believe this directly affects interoperability of app/ps
As far as I can tell, PostScript (tm) interpreters don't care which newline
convention you use. Both CR and LF (and by extension, CRLF) are treated as
white space characters, except in comments and strings. This is part of
the PostScript language definition.
On the other hand, if we could argue that application/postscript files must
also be usable as text files on recipients' systems, then we might want to
define a newline convention for the transmission of application/postscript
files over MIME.
I suppose the meaning of a string like
(This is a string
with a newline in it)
changes if the end-of-line convention is different between originator and
recipient. So maybe we should recommend that application/PostScript
programs don't use bare newlines in PostScript strings.
Keith