> Citing Alan Perlis: "Beware of the Turing tar pit, where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy". I posited here on HN Postscript / PDF recen

> Citing Alan Perlis: "Beware of the Turing tar pit, where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy". I posited here on HN Postscript / PDF recently is just such a tar pit, but got down voted for it. If you've every tried to copy and paste from a PDF and got rubbish (as opposed to a message saying you aren't allowed to do that), the reason is the Turning complete program painting the page doesn't have to paint things in a particular order and the things it paints may be bit maps. In the worst case you may as well be trying to copy a bunch of PNG images that have been plonked onto the canvas that happen to look like letters to a human. We would have been far better off with a declarative way of painting a page. It's not that hard - SVG achieves the same end result, and is purely declarative.