4 ms·
I wonder if there were ever any PostScript ROMs that did things other than fonts, like special purpose graphics procedures?
by afandian 4y ago
I wonder if there were ever any PostScript ROMs that did things other than fonts, like special purpose graphics procedures?
- kjs3 4y agoPostScript was an entire programming language focused on page description. Every PS implementation did more than just fonts...
- afandian 4y agoYes, my question was whether there were special purpose cartridges / ROMs that had custom PostScript in them for dedicated applications.
- KerrAvon 4y agoI'd guess not, given the expense of producing cartridges at relatively low volume and that it was very rare for someone to write their own raw PostScript code, as would be required to take advantage of such things. But I don't know.
- kjs3 4y agoNope. PostScript is interpreted. All you had to do was squirt "raw PostScript code" down to the printer and it would interpret it. You didn't have to create a new cartridge. People wrote PS programs to do custom stuff all the time.
- kjs3 4y agoWhy? PostScript is a programming language. You create applications in it (within the limitations of the hardware); they just happen to usually be used to create printed pages. People did all sorts of other weird things with PostScript.
- convolvatron 4y agoi got sick of the charting toolchains and wrote a .ps which, when concatenated with a two-column file of datapoints, treated the first row as axis labels, auto scaled the x and y axis and printed a chart. postscript is a great playground
- kjs3 4y agoYeah...smart folks figure all sorts of awesome uses for PS like you did. In college we had big issues with students writing PS programs and crushing the shared printer CPUs making them unavailable to anyone else till their program finished (or we powercycled the printer). It takes a long time to compute an A4 sized, 600dpi Mandelbrot set on a 4MHz 68000.
- dezgeg 4y agoI remember writing a Markov chain random text generator. I wonder what real world uses there would be for the rand command...
- afandian 4y agoI don't know, people do all kinds of crazy things! I thought someone in this thread might know. Imaginary examples: DRM for high-quality CAD symbols paired with a commercial software package. Or something combinatorially complex with random access where you'd have to ship a huge PostScript file over the wire.
- smitelli 4y agoThere was at least one called "Barcodes and More" offered by HP. I distinctly remember it being plugged into the LaserJet IIIP at my parents' house when I was much younger, but I don't remember anything about how/if it worked.
- KerrAvon 4y agoIt was common to represent barcodes as fonts back in the day.