[HN Gopher] Mathematical Illustrations: A Manual of Geometry and...
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Mathematical Illustrations: A Manual of Geometry and PostScript
Author : Bogdanp
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-06-16 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (personal.math.ubc.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (personal.math.ubc.ca)
| wosined wrote:
| What are the advantages of PostScript vs Asymptote?
| JadeNB wrote:
| Probably mostly the fact that this was started (according to
| the website) in 1996 and essentially frozen in 2004, which I
| believe predates the public announcement of Asymptote.
|
| Does Asymptote get much use these days? I thought it was pretty
| cool, though a bit hard to wrap my mind around, when I first
| tried it, but nowadays it seems that attention has moved on to
| TikZ.
| WillAdams wrote:
| A quick search shows a paper on it just a couple of years
| back:
|
| https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-2/tb137hefferon-asymptote.pdf
|
| I found Asymptote interesting, but I'm trying to wrap my mind
| around METAPOST (and by extension METAFONT) as an easier
| thing to implement/use.
| wosined wrote:
| Does Asymptote get much use these days?
|
| Not sure. I use it and it is reguarly updated.
|
| https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/
| https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/gallery/2Dgraphs/index.html
| https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/gallery/3Dgraphs/index.html
| aoki wrote:
| > Does Asymptote get much use these days?
|
| Kids who get most of the way through AoPS (typically) end up
| learning some Asymptote as that is the supported way to draw
| figures on the AoPS website
| WillAdams wrote:
| Low-level, cool stack manipulation, and it predated Asymptote
| (2003) by being released in 1984.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Bill Casselman is an amazing mathematician with a diversity of
| interests. As this makes clear, he's been embracing computation
| and computational mathematics "since before it was cool." He also
| has an interest in mathematical history, and travelled to India
| to see the oldest-known occurrence of 0
| (https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-
| indi...). I'm sure he has tons of other interests about which I
| don't know.
| WillAdams wrote:
| As cool as this is, I think most folks would find the newer
| tools:
|
| - Asymptote
|
| - Eukleides
|
| - TikZ
|
| - METAPOST
|
| - Nodebox
|
| - OpenSCAD --- see the book series: Geometry:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make Trigonometry:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123127774-make Calculus:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61739368-make
|
| of greater interest (and for the Pythonistas there is:
| https://pythonscad.org/ ) --- I'd be interested to know of other
| tools in this space.
|
| That said, most folks just use Inkscape (though at least it has
| scripting): https://inkscape.org/~pakin/%E2%98%85simple-inkscape-
| scripti...
|
| Maybe Graphite will spur interest?
| detourdog wrote:
| >- OpenSCAD --- see the book >series: Geometry:
| >https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make
| Trigonometry:
| >https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123127774-make Calculus:
| >https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61739368-make
|
| Do these books actually reference OpenScad or is OpenScad a
| tool for experimenting with the ideas in the series?
| WillAdams wrote:
| The idea is to use OpenSCAD to make 3D objects which explore
| the concepts being taught.
|
| If you want to learn OpenSCAD itself then you want:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41392892-programming-
| wit...
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I still think PostScript is good (although I had some ideas
| about how it could be improved, some of which are: allowing
| automatic allocation for some things by passing null instead of
| the object to store into, allowing setting the encoding
| separately from the font, a resource for environment variables,
| two-way communication with external programs, alpha
| transparency, FFI, magic dictionaries, etc).
|
| PostScript can be used with or without graphics; I have used it
| in both ways, because I think PostScript is not a bad
| programming language, and has many advantages.
| WillAdams wrote:
| I miss Display PostScript from my NeXT Cube, and really wish
| that some programming system would bring a bit of that back.
|
| I'd be very interested in a recommendation for a GUI
| programming toolkit and UI set which focused on/made
| available vector graphics.
| groos wrote:
| What a delight! Thanks for the link.
| max_ wrote:
| Is there a single giant PDF for this?
| WillAdams wrote:
| Not that I know of, back when I read it I had to stitch the
| files together.
| smurpy wrote:
| Haha! I used to do LOTS of work in PostScript. The biggest
| project was a system which was part Python for the management,
| but PS for the content of a database publishing engine, motivated
| by the the need to generate crazily complicated real estate
| books, back in the day. There was a whole huge template system
| for different kinds of commercial and residential property and
| all sorts of different sections, ranges and indices. It was
| responsible for generating hundreds of multi-hundred page
| documents per day for dozens of real estate boards across Western
| Canada. Each publication was about as complicated as a Yellow
| Pages and generated daily and automatically from ever-changing
| data. In fact, the underlying database schema could evolve
| automatically through the update mechanisms in RETS (the Real
| Estate Transaction System API), though that was on the Python
| side. The rendering happened using GhostScript out to PDF for
| printing and electronic distribution to realtors. A stupid amount
| of detail, but what else is a touch of the 'tsim for anyway?!?
|
| My other PostScript stuff was mostly fun and experimental: some
| fractal hacks which made printers and typesetters groan and some
| collaborative knowledge visualization stuff. I got started with
| PostScript on my NextStation in 1991 and it served me well, being
| the basis of a whole career of programmatic visualization.
| smurpy wrote:
| As a language it is lovely, if you're a fan of minimalism --
| being stack-happy, like FORTH. It is well worth learning even
| just to flex the mind, but especially if you need to make
| complex diagrams and value stable APIs.
| smurpy wrote:
| Here is the three original Postscript Books. They are the classic
| way to learn PS.
|
| The Blue Book (Tutorial and Cookbook)
| https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse
|
| The Red Book (Language Reference)
| https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse_l1h3
|
| The Green Book (Language Design)
| https://archive.org/details/PSGreenBook
| glkindlmann wrote:
| Like others[1] I was saddened that Mac's Preview program stopped
| opening .ps/.eps files with the release of Ventura in late 2022.
| I never understood exactly why; I guess security issues around
| the PostScript interpreter. But that made it lot less convenient
| to hack around in .ps files. Ghostscript's interactive display
| program(s?) never seemed as convenient as Preview.
|
| Still, this book is awesome and I've been inspired by it for
| awhile. I used to love whipping up diagrams and simple vector art
| in .ps/.eps files. In a fit of procrastination in ~2006 I created
| a minimalist horizontal rule for an IEEE conference submission,
| and that diamondrule.eps[2] has now become the standard. I would
| say that EPS is still more convenient than SVG as a format to
| contain, in one self-contained file, raster graphics with
| overlaid vector graphics.
|
| [1] https://tidbits.com/2022/10/27/preview-in-ventura-drops-
| supp...
|
| [2] https://github.com/ieeevgtc/tvcg-journal-
| latex/blob/main/dia...
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