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Interesting, I’ve been writing a PostScript interpreter over the last year with the intention of making it as close to the original Apple LaserWriter as possibl

Interesting, I’ve been writing a PostScript interpreter over the last year with the intention of making it as close to the original Apple LaserWriter as possible. I’ve been using Rust for my project and so far have avoided any 3rd party libraries. I have an original LaserWriter although it won’t feed paper. I pulled the ROMs and have them running in the game emulator MAME. I’m currently working on the clip/eoclip operators.

AndyCappDev 8mo ago
Yea... the first two interpreters I wrote in C used no third party libraries either. But I admit that I did not write a rasterizer for those as all they needed to do whas convert to other formats. I did write rasterization code for a Win95 driver for HP that was very fast. I used Michael Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming as a starting point and extended/expanded on his algorithms. This time around I wanted to focus on the PostScript language itself and cairo saved me a lot of time on the hind end. Though it does have some bugs... Like it's strokepath implementation for dashed lines. I worked around them though by writing my own strokepath and feed them to cario as raw paths. The LaserWriter angle is certainly interesting though. Why specific to the LaserWriter may I ask?
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
  I did consider using Cairo but figured a simple PDF driver would take care of most of the work. That would have been fine if not for the pathforall operator. I ended up doing all the stroke path implementation for dashed lines as well. I used to work for the UK distributor for QMS who were Adobe's second largest OEM for PostScript so I had a lot of exposure to early PostScript printers. Also I've always thought the LaserWriter was more significant to Apple than most people realise. I lost count of the number of companies I visited who had a bunch of Macs and a LaserWriter networked over AppleTalk.
fithisux 8mo ago
Is there any repository?

AndyCappDev 8mo ago

Yea... the first two interpreters I wrote in C used no third party libraries either. But I admit that I did not write a rasterizer for those as all they needed to do whas convert to other formats. I did write rasterization code for a Win95 driver for HP that was very fast. I used Michael Abrash's Zen of Graphics Programming as a starting point and extended/expanded on his algorithms. This time around I wanted to focus on the PostScript language itself and cairo saved me a lot of time on the hind end. Though it does have some bugs... Like it's strokepath implementation for dashed lines. I worked around them though by writing my own strokepath and feed them to cario as raw paths. The LaserWriter angle is certainly interesting though. Why specific to the LaserWriter may I ask?

tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
I did consider using Cairo but figured a simple PDF driver would take care of most of the work. That would have been fine if not for the pathforall operator. I ended up doing all the stroke path implementation for dashed lines as well. I used to work for the UK distributor for QMS who were Adobe's second largest OEM for PostScript so I had a lot of exposure to early PostScript printers. Also I've always thought the LaserWriter was more significant to Apple than most people realise. I lost count of the number of companies I visited who had a bunch of Macs and a LaserWriter networked over AppleTalk.

fithisux 8mo ago

Is there any repository?