[HN Gopher] PostScript: A Digital Printing Press
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PostScript: A Digital Printing Press
Author : linguae
Score : 40 points
Date : 2022-12-01 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (computerhistory.org)
| dveeden2 wrote:
| This talks about a presentation that was given where the details
| of font hinting were disclosed. Does anyone know if there is a
| video available of that?
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Code in TeX, Asciidoc, and/or Markdown, and then create page-
| layout formats (ePubs, PDFs, and/or PS) and layoutless media like
| txt, man (groff), and html.
|
| IIRC, the HP LJ4 had to have a special option to print PS
| directly.
| dveeden2 wrote:
| This didn't mention display postscript, which was used on the
| NeXT systems (and later on MacOS?)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Display Postscript was only used in Rhapsody, the very first
| releases of what later became OS X, but not in Classic MacOS
| (up to System 9).
|
| Apple removed Display Postscript for OS X - it was insecure by
| default, e.g. allowing remote file access, when using the
| remote display feature on NeXT/OpenStep. I guess Apple also
| wanted to avoid the Adobe licensing fees....
| Maursault wrote:
| I'm not sure how you could fail to mention that Apple
| cleverly avoided Adobe's licensing fees by moving from
| Display PostScript to Display PDF.[1] PDF was free under
| GPLv2, and if I'm not mistaken, still is, so Apple shouldn't
| mind still using it... as long as it doesn't change to GPLv3.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#Native_display_model
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Thanks for adding this - I considered to include it, but
| couldn't find a source stating that the technology was
| officially called DisplayPDF.
|
| I think Apple's official term for the OS X graphics layer
| is "Quartz" and there's a short discussion about the use of
| PDF in Quartz on Wikipedia which states "Quartz's internal
| imaging model correlates well with the PDF object graph,
| making it easy to output PDF to multiple devices":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_o
| f...
|
| This arstechnica article linked on the Wikipedia page gives
| some more details, but it was written in 2000, so many
| things might have changed since then:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2000/05/mac-os-x-dp4/4/
|
| I think it's reasonable to assume that Apple's Quartz code
| in OS X no longer includes any actual Adobe code, so this
| might have been sufficient to avoid the licensing fees.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Too bad most printers today are not capable of interpreting
| PostScript directly, like they used to back in the day.
| (Curiously, the microprocessors built into such printers were
| more powerful than those found in personal computers at the
| time.)
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Some header files seem to be missing from the published code:
| except.h, framebuf.h, gray.h, reducer.h
|
| In additon, the code is (as expected) written in K&R C, so it
| won't compile out of the box on a modern system.
| IvanK_net wrote:
| I wrote a PostScript interpreter in Javascript four years ago :)
| Write a program and see it rendered:
| https://www.ivank.net/veci/pdfi/
| somat wrote:
| Postscript is one of my favorite languages, Something about stack
| based languages with simple consistent syntax. I suspect if I had
| picked up forth before PS it would occupy the same fond spot in
| my head. but I did not and now I find forths typing awkward, and
| it lacks the killer feature of postscript, you get to draw
| pictures.
|
| I love making hand written artisanal postscript. The neatest
| thing I ever made was a sort of box model, the idea being the
| main advantage(there are many, but go with me here) of putting
| your document in html over PS is that html justifies and flows
| your text. So it was a library where you could specify a box(or a
| set of linked boxes) for your text area and postscript would auto
| fold the contained text. The idea was to have all sorts of
| functions to make it easy to write documents in postscript
| directly, no one but me actually wants to do this, so it remains
| a perpetual prototype.
|
| edit: found it, the code is in a sorry state, like I said
| perpetual prototype, but here is how I did a box model(ish) in PS
|
| https://nl1.outband.net/fossil/misc/file?name=dtp.ps&ci=tip
| triska wrote:
| PostScript is such a beautiful language! I used to study the
| PostScript reference manual for hours at a time, in awe of its
| elegance and perfection:
|
| https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf
|
| How interesting a web would be with embeddable PostScript
| figures! Yes it's Turing-complete and all, and yes that's no
| problem: Interpret these figures with a timeout, make the
| interpretation interruptible, use a sandbox or different threads
| for rendering etc. HTML+CSS+user interaction is Turing complete
| as well, and we can still browse the web despite this.
|
| Thank you a lot for PostScript!
| mncharity wrote:
| Can anyone suggest elegant PS code for reading?
|
| Manuals are nice, but there's elegant and concise practice to
| enjoy as well. For instance, graphics state as first-class
| objects to be passed around an retained in multiplicity, in
| painfully stark contrast to the impoverishing scarcity of HTML
| canvas's graphics contexts.
| linguae wrote:
| The Computer History Museum has just announced the release of the
| source code of the original version of Adobe PostScript
| (https://info.computerhistory.org/aoc-postscript). It is not open
| source under the OSI definition, however; there is a license
| agreement that must be signed to get access to the code, and
| (among other stipulations) the license only allows non-commercial
| use, and I don't believe it can be re-uploaded to another site
| such as GitHub.
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