5 ms·

Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser

154 points by ingve 6mo ago

1f60c 6mo ago
> 502 Bad Gateway People must really love PostScript!
- DonHopkins 6mo ago
  The printer's jammed, give them some time. Meanwhile, more about PostScript: John Warnock's "linguistic motherboard" and Owen Densmore's "class.ps" smalltalk-like object oriented PostScript programming system, which NeWS and The NeWS toolkit used. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116 Owen Densmore's work with Bill Atkinson and John Warnock on the Mac printing system, and his "linguistic motherboard" email and "Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility" white paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827923 More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201231
  - macintux 6mo ago
    My boss, many years ago, talked about the time he programmed a printer to act as a web server using Postscript. I never asked what happened to other print requests while it was running.
    - ale42 6mo ago
      They were silently sent to the client browsers... ;-)
    - jeffrallen 6mo ago
      They were routed to the integrated time machine in PS, and sent to the year 2026 when they would be rendered in mobile phones, then the bitmaps would be sent back in time to your boss's printer.
    - somat 6mo ago
      There is an apocryphal story about some poor sys-admin who after spending several days trying to diagnose mysteries hangs in the new office laser printer. traced it to one user who was sending long print jobs that printed nothing. This enterprising engineer had to be told to knock it off after explaining how the new laser printer had the most powerful computer in the office and as such had rewritten some of his simulation code in postscript to run on the printer.
  - kenshi 6mo ago
    Thanks for posting this! I've started looking into the history of Postscript because I was looking into the idea of "sending a program not a data structure". Some thoughts so far: https://krishna.github.io/posts/send-a-program-not-a-datastructure/ https://krishna.github.io/posts/send-a-program-not-a-datastr...
    - horacemorace 6mo ago
      Check out Don Lancaster’s tinaja archive, if it’s still around. He was quite enamored with NeXT style universal postscript and wrote at length about it.
      - DonHopkins 6mo ago
        Don Lancaster passed away in 2023 at 83. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster Don Lancaster has died (gilaherald.com) https://gilaherald.com/obituary-for-don-lancaster/ https://gilaherald.com/obituary-for-don-lancaster/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36545595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36545595 Woody Baker was one of his biggest fans on comp.lang.postscript! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546584 DonHopkins on July 1, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Don Lancaster has died I have always been a huge fan of Don Lancaster's wizardly writing about PostScript, who not only regularly published in Computer Shopper, but also generously ran a free PostScript help line at his own personal phone number. But Woody Baker was by far his biggest most enthusiastic fan of all (and highly eccentric in personality and coding style), and he would regularly extol and evangelize Don Lancaster's virtues and ideas on comp.lang.postscript. Once around March 4 1990, I gave Woody Baker some feedback on his comp.lang.postscript faq, including the suggesting that he might consider leaving Don Lancaster's personal phone number out of it, but he replied: >Again, I want to thank you for your contributions. You and D. Cortesi have been most helpful. The two of you gave me very in depth feedback. I have moved almost all the editorializing to the end. I have moved the style stuff to the end. As for DON LANCASTER, I left his phone number in. Don publishes it regularly in the computer shopper, as a free PostScript help line. He is self-employed, and a widely published Author, for TAB books among other things. He says he averages 80 helpline calls a day. He also sells programs and books that he is self publishing. I can assure you, he won't mind at all. Woody loved to talk in depth about how amazing and inspirational Don Lancaster was, and defend his well deserved honor and reputation whenever anybody criticized his work. http://computer-programming-forum.com/36-postscript/ff79f7dd099e02c8-2.htm http://computer-programming-forum.com/36-postscript/ff79f7dd... [broken link, not on archive org] >True. Don lives in an APPLE II world. You are wrong, however in certain statements. He has (unfortunatly) mentioned what FLXPROC does. It happens to be critical to certain things, that several consultants are working on here and there. He knows enough not to blab some things, and jerk work out from under individuals (at least some of the time). Don has dug pretty deeply into certain areas of PS, and I have dug deeply into other areas of PS. Don is first and formost a writer. He's self employed, and extremely intellegent. I am first and formost a software engineer, and secondly a writer. I tend to write, however for clients. I'm confident that I know what FLXPROC does, and what it is good for. And I'm sure Don does also. I more or less told him about FLXPROC and he more or less told me what it does. After first quarter 1990, some things will be essentially worthless as consulting info, and will rapidly become public knowlege. I don't applogize for keeping the lid on some things. I'm a bit of a mercenary in a way. I like consulting. >Cheers >Woody Their great respect was mutual: https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1 https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1 https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1/Ask_the_Guru_v1_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1/Ask_the_Guru_v1_d... >Don Lancaster's ASK THE GURU Selected reprints >Copyright c. 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics, Box 809, Thatcher, AZ 85552. (520) 428-4073 >Electronically self-published using the Apple //e computer and the LaserWriter Plus. All graphics were done in their entirety by ProDOS Applewriter 2.1. [...] >I don't think I was ever more amazed when Woody Baker of The Copier Store mailed me back one of my very own laser printed business cards — redone in real ink in an almost "embossed" gold! Turns out Woody had found an older Omnicrom machine scunging around unsold in the back of his warehouse and fired it up. Lo and behold, the instant conversion of any toner image to real ink in stunning colors! Example 10 of Don Lancaster's Postscript Show & Tell beautifully illustrates how an Omnicrom printer works: https://www.tinaja.com/glib/psnt.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/psnt.pdf >Example ten -- What appears hear as a mild-mannered Postscript technical illustration is really the secret of full color laser printing. >Omnicrom sheets are real ink applied to a carrier. You place the sheet in contact with your toner image and then run it back through the fusion rollers a second time. The ink gets fused over the toner.
- arethuza 6mo ago
  I really liked developing in PostScript within NeWS... had quite a lispy interactive feeling to it. It was perfectly usable on a early '90s Sun Workstation so I'd love to know what performance would be like on the vastly faster machines we have now.
- crabbone 6mo ago
  PostScript was the first language I ever used professionally! :P At the time, I worked for a printing house in Kyiv that specialized in accidental printing (screen printing, flexo-, tampo- etc. i.e. mostly printing on weird curved surfaces, not paper). The triad (full-color) screen printing was all the rage (early-mid 90s). Part of the process of generating the films that were later used to irradiate the polymer layer covering the screen mold was bound to a bootleg Scitex machines IDF used for printing maps. While we had the machines, we didn't have a proper driver that could take a color image, separate it into channels and instruct the machines to produce the films. So, I'd produce PS files from, eg. Photoshop (also bootleg...) and then edit the PS files by hand to match the requirements from the Scitex machines. I wasn't a programmer by training, and doing all this stuff absolutely felt like magic. Something I will never experience with computers again :'(
panick21_ 6mo ago
Sun NeWS in the browser would be cool as well.
- DonHopkins 6mo ago
  Pre-web, and using the NeWS version UniPress Emacs 2.20 (Gosling Emacs, aka NeMACS) as the authoring tool: Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsing-a-look-back-at-the-hyperties-workstation-browser-535eab3a3b3c https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi... HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... The Interactive Encyclopedia System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interactive_Encyclopedia_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interactive_Encyclopedia_S... UniPress Emacs 2.20 (NeMACS) source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS Here's the Emacs NeWS driver, a "C to PostScript" interface file: https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/TrmPS.cps https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/Trm...
tnelsond4 6mo ago
This is pretty sweet. I wonder if this is better than running pdf.js. I just recently needed jbig2 image support in my web app and using pdf.js wasn't gonna work and be too slow and the wrong interface anyway, so I took the source code for the jbig2 decoder and vibe coded a converter that outputs 1 bit pngs. After some manual culling of code I got the wasm module down to 27kb with no glue.
gnerd00 6mo ago
postscript hacks are fun! the encryption on Type 1 fonts in 1987 was broken by Harvey Grosser, an ex-IBM System 360 coder, in Palo Alto. NeWS was bad NeWS to many, with a minuscule user base at its peak. Meanwhile, every print publication in existence was faced with "do or die" in digital production. Many ended with the latter, many years later.
thomasfl 6mo ago
How much does a subscription for this website costs per month? After all it says Adobe in the title.
stuaxo 6mo ago
Wonderful.
sgt 6mo ago
Dropped a .ps in there, it's just stuck "rendering".
dsecurity49 6mo ago
[dead]
jeffrallen 6mo ago
But does it say "PC LOAD LETTER"?
nticompass 6mo ago
I didn't have a PostScript file, so I had to find one. I downloaded the test files from here: http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/postscript.html http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/postscript.html Minus the colors, they worked and look pretty good.
- DonHopkins 6mo ago
  It did a nice job on the classic NeWS "PostScript for Poets" t-shirt! https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/pictures/teeshirt.ps https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/pictures/teesh...
0x0 6mo ago
Such a shame that macOS lost all its built-in postscript support including Preview.app in recent versions :(
- JadeNB 6mo ago
  I didn't know that! Is it announced somewhere, even buried deep in release notes, or just one of those things that they decided silently to enshittify?
  - 0x0 6mo ago
    Details here: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/09/25/postscripts-sudden-death-in-sonoma/ https://eclecticlight.co/2023/09/25/postscripts-sudden-death...
    - zackmorris 6mo ago
      Oh man. I used PostScript a ton when I worked at hp 20 years ago. It's actually a pretty great language, like lisp/scheme but I found it to be more approachable somehow. Maybe because it's postfix instead of prefix? https://liucs.net/cs101s13/fixity.html https://liucs.net/cs101s13/fixity.html Anyway, it had several fatal flaws. I don't think it could handle images natively, so instead it encoded them as vectors and those files took up MB. It probably just needed a metaphor like iframe. I remember when Apple switched to the PDF engine in Quartz in preparation for OS X in the late 90s, I thought it was a mistake then. The QuickDraw it was replacing was actually quite good, in some ways the epitome of C-style rendering. And Cocoa was refreshing at first (it handled stuff like palettes and gamma in a data-driven way instead of through leaky abstractions) but without a way to transition off QuickDraw, it felt like more busywork that had to be done just to keep up. https://eclecticlight.co/2024/06/01/pdf-on-macs-the-rise-and-fall-of-preview/ https://eclecticlight.co/2024/06/01/pdf-on-macs-the-rise-and... Apple seems to have lost its academic roots, and suffers for it now. Or I should say, its customers suffer while it grosses almost half a trillion dollars per year. At least with vibe coding we can just whip up a Preview app in an afternoon, so maybe none of this matters anymore.
leoc 6mo ago
For anyone who wants to type or paste into the Code textarea: * https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/papers/BLUEBOOK.pdf https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/papers/BLUEBOOK.pdf The PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (the "Blue Book") (principally) by Linda Gass and John Deubert, 1986 (ISBN 0-201-10179-3) * https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf The PostScript Language Reference (third ed.—a later edition of the "Red Book") (principally) by Ed Taft, Steve Chernicoff and Caroline Rose, 1999 (ISBN 0-201-27922-8) * https://connor.zip/resources/pdfs/adobe-green-book.pdf https://connor.zip/resources/pdfs/adobe-green-book.pdf PostScript Language Program Design (the "Green Book") by (principally) by Glenn Reid, 1988 (ISBN 0-201-14396-8). A zipfile with Green Book code files: https://web.archive.org/web/20110613223722/http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/sdk/sample/GreenBook.zip https://web.archive.org/web/20110613223722/http://partners.a... (At first my retro-ps tab got itself into a state in which it would not run any code entered into the Code textarea, instead timing out and returning an error; and since page reload is soft-disabled you'll have to either force a reload or open a new tab. Also, since the Abobe sample code uses indentation extensively—for example the Blue Book's official "hello world" program is newpath 144 72 moveto 144 432 lineto stroke showpage —it would be nice if the Code textarea handled Tab keyboard inputs. )
- leoc 6mo ago
  Some pages with more PostScript book recommendations and sometimes links (I'm no authority myself): https://luc.devroye.org/lucbps.html https://luc.devroye.org/lucbps.html https://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/psdocs/Books.html https://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/psdocs/Books.html https://gist.github.com/jpluimers/9a50d0ba14fe975906ea8788a352e269 https://gist.github.com/jpluimers/9a50d0ba14fe975906ea8788a3...
DonHopkins 6mo ago
[dead]
giannicmptr1000 6mo ago
can't wait until adobe goes away... almost
ardline 6mo ago
Solid work. The devil's in the operational complexity, but this looks manageable.

154 points by ingve 6mo ago

1f60c 6mo ago

> 502 Bad Gateway People must really love PostScript!

DonHopkins 6mo ago
The printer's jammed, give them some time. Meanwhile, more about PostScript: John Warnock's "linguistic motherboard" and Owen Densmore's "class.ps" smalltalk-like object oriented PostScript programming system, which NeWS and The NeWS toolkit used. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116 Owen Densmore's work with Bill Atkinson and John Warnock on the Mac printing system, and his "linguistic motherboard" email and "Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility" white paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827923 More history of PostScript, JAM, InterPress, and John Warnock's vision of PostScript as a "Linguistic Motherboard": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37201231
- macintux 6mo ago
  My boss, many years ago, talked about the time he programmed a printer to act as a web server using Postscript. I never asked what happened to other print requests while it was running.
  - ale42 6mo ago
    They were silently sent to the client browsers... ;-)
  - jeffrallen 6mo ago
    They were routed to the integrated time machine in PS, and sent to the year 2026 when they would be rendered in mobile phones, then the bitmaps would be sent back in time to your boss's printer.
  - somat 6mo ago
    There is an apocryphal story about some poor sys-admin who after spending several days trying to diagnose mysteries hangs in the new office laser printer. traced it to one user who was sending long print jobs that printed nothing. This enterprising engineer had to be told to knock it off after explaining how the new laser printer had the most powerful computer in the office and as such had rewritten some of his simulation code in postscript to run on the printer.
- kenshi 6mo ago
  Thanks for posting this! I've started looking into the history of Postscript because I was looking into the idea of "sending a program not a data structure". Some thoughts so far: https://krishna.github.io/posts/send-a-program-not-a-datastructure/ https://krishna.github.io/posts/send-a-program-not-a-datastr...
  - horacemorace 6mo ago
    Check out Don Lancaster’s tinaja archive, if it’s still around. He was quite enamored with NeXT style universal postscript and wrote at length about it.
    - DonHopkins 6mo ago
      Don Lancaster passed away in 2023 at 83. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster Don Lancaster has died (gilaherald.com) https://gilaherald.com/obituary-for-don-lancaster/ https://gilaherald.com/obituary-for-don-lancaster/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36545595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36545595 Woody Baker was one of his biggest fans on comp.lang.postscript! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36546584 DonHopkins on July 1, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Don Lancaster has died I have always been a huge fan of Don Lancaster's wizardly writing about PostScript, who not only regularly published in Computer Shopper, but also generously ran a free PostScript help line at his own personal phone number. But Woody Baker was by far his biggest most enthusiastic fan of all (and highly eccentric in personality and coding style), and he would regularly extol and evangelize Don Lancaster's virtues and ideas on comp.lang.postscript. Once around March 4 1990, I gave Woody Baker some feedback on his comp.lang.postscript faq, including the suggesting that he might consider leaving Don Lancaster's personal phone number out of it, but he replied: >Again, I want to thank you for your contributions. You and D. Cortesi have been most helpful. The two of you gave me very in depth feedback. I have moved almost all the editorializing to the end. I have moved the style stuff to the end. As for DON LANCASTER, I left his phone number in. Don publishes it regularly in the computer shopper, as a free PostScript help line. He is self-employed, and a widely published Author, for TAB books among other things. He says he averages 80 helpline calls a day. He also sells programs and books that he is self publishing. I can assure you, he won't mind at all. Woody loved to talk in depth about how amazing and inspirational Don Lancaster was, and defend his well deserved honor and reputation whenever anybody criticized his work. http://computer-programming-forum.com/36-postscript/ff79f7dd099e02c8-2.htm http://computer-programming-forum.com/36-postscript/ff79f7dd... [broken link, not on archive org] >True. Don lives in an APPLE II world. You are wrong, however in certain statements. He has (unfortunatly) mentioned what FLXPROC does. It happens to be critical to certain things, that several consultants are working on here and there. He knows enough not to blab some things, and jerk work out from under individuals (at least some of the time). Don has dug pretty deeply into certain areas of PS, and I have dug deeply into other areas of PS. Don is first and formost a writer. He's self employed, and extremely intellegent. I am first and formost a software engineer, and secondly a writer. I tend to write, however for clients. I'm confident that I know what FLXPROC does, and what it is good for. And I'm sure Don does also. I more or less told him about FLXPROC and he more or less told me what it does. After first quarter 1990, some things will be essentially worthless as consulting info, and will rapidly become public knowlege. I don't applogize for keeping the lid on some things. I'm a bit of a mercenary in a way. I like consulting. >Cheers >Woody Their great respect was mutual: https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1 https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1 https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1/Ask_the_Guru_v1_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/Ask_the_Guru_v1/Ask_the_Guru_v1_d... >Don Lancaster's ASK THE GURU Selected reprints >Copyright c. 1987 by Don Lancaster and Synergetics, Box 809, Thatcher, AZ 85552. (520) 428-4073 >Electronically self-published using the Apple //e computer and the LaserWriter Plus. All graphics were done in their entirety by ProDOS Applewriter 2.1. [...] >I don't think I was ever more amazed when Woody Baker of The Copier Store mailed me back one of my very own laser printed business cards — redone in real ink in an almost "embossed" gold! Turns out Woody had found an older Omnicrom machine scunging around unsold in the back of his warehouse and fired it up. Lo and behold, the instant conversion of any toner image to real ink in stunning colors! Example 10 of Don Lancaster's Postscript Show & Tell beautifully illustrates how an Omnicrom printer works: https://www.tinaja.com/glib/psnt.pdf https://www.tinaja.com/glib/psnt.pdf >Example ten -- What appears hear as a mild-mannered Postscript technical illustration is really the secret of full color laser printing. >Omnicrom sheets are real ink applied to a carrier. You place the sheet in contact with your toner image and then run it back through the fusion rollers a second time. The ink gets fused over the toner.
arethuza 6mo ago
I really liked developing in PostScript within NeWS... had quite a lispy interactive feeling to it. It was perfectly usable on a early '90s Sun Workstation so I'd love to know what performance would be like on the vastly faster machines we have now.
crabbone 6mo ago
PostScript was the first language I ever used professionally! :P At the time, I worked for a printing house in Kyiv that specialized in accidental printing (screen printing, flexo-, tampo- etc. i.e. mostly printing on weird curved surfaces, not paper). The triad (full-color) screen printing was all the rage (early-mid 90s). Part of the process of generating the films that were later used to irradiate the polymer layer covering the screen mold was bound to a bootleg Scitex machines IDF used for printing maps. While we had the machines, we didn't have a proper driver that could take a color image, separate it into channels and instruct the machines to produce the films. So, I'd produce PS files from, eg. Photoshop (also bootleg...) and then edit the PS files by hand to match the requirements from the Scitex machines. I wasn't a programmer by training, and doing all this stuff absolutely felt like magic. Something I will never experience with computers again :'(

panick21_ 6mo ago

Sun NeWS in the browser would be cool as well.

DonHopkins 6mo ago
Pre-web, and using the NeWS version UniPress Emacs 2.20 (Gosling Emacs, aka NeMACS) as the authoring tool: Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsing-a-look-back-at-the-hyperties-workstation-browser-535eab3a3b3c https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi... HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hacker-news-937d156f0330 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac... The Interactive Encyclopedia System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interactive_Encyclopedia_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interactive_Encyclopedia_S... UniPress Emacs 2.20 (NeMACS) source code: https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS Here's the Emacs NeWS driver, a "C to PostScript" interface file: https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/TrmPS.cps https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/Trm...

tnelsond4 6mo ago

This is pretty sweet. I wonder if this is better than running pdf.js. I just recently needed jbig2 image support in my web app and using pdf.js wasn't gonna work and be too slow and the wrong interface anyway, so I took the source code for the jbig2 decoder and vibe coded a converter that outputs 1 bit pngs. After some manual culling of code I got the wasm module down to 27kb with no glue.

gnerd00 6mo ago

postscript hacks are fun! the encryption on Type 1 fonts in 1987 was broken by Harvey Grosser, an ex-IBM System 360 coder, in Palo Alto. NeWS was bad NeWS to many, with a minuscule user base at its peak. Meanwhile, every print publication in existence was faced with "do or die" in digital production. Many ended with the latter, many years later.

thomasfl 6mo ago

How much does a subscription for this website costs per month? After all it says Adobe in the title.

stuaxo 6mo ago

Wonderful.

sgt 6mo ago

Dropped a .ps in there, it's just stuck "rendering".

dsecurity49 6mo ago

[dead]

jeffrallen 6mo ago

But does it say "PC LOAD LETTER"?

nticompass 6mo ago

I didn't have a PostScript file, so I had to find one. I downloaded the test files from here: http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/postscript.html http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/postscript.html Minus the colors, they worked and look pretty good.

DonHopkins 6mo ago
It did a nice job on the classic NeWS "PostScript for Poets" t-shirt! https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/pictures/teeshirt.ps https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/pictures/teesh...

0x0 6mo ago

Such a shame that macOS lost all its built-in postscript support including Preview.app in recent versions :(

JadeNB 6mo ago
I didn't know that! Is it announced somewhere, even buried deep in release notes, or just one of those things that they decided silently to enshittify?
- 0x0 6mo ago
  Details here: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/09/25/postscripts-sudden-death-in-sonoma/ https://eclecticlight.co/2023/09/25/postscripts-sudden-death...
  - zackmorris 6mo ago
    Oh man. I used PostScript a ton when I worked at hp 20 years ago. It's actually a pretty great language, like lisp/scheme but I found it to be more approachable somehow. Maybe because it's postfix instead of prefix? https://liucs.net/cs101s13/fixity.html https://liucs.net/cs101s13/fixity.html Anyway, it had several fatal flaws. I don't think it could handle images natively, so instead it encoded them as vectors and those files took up MB. It probably just needed a metaphor like iframe. I remember when Apple switched to the PDF engine in Quartz in preparation for OS X in the late 90s, I thought it was a mistake then. The QuickDraw it was replacing was actually quite good, in some ways the epitome of C-style rendering. And Cocoa was refreshing at first (it handled stuff like palettes and gamma in a data-driven way instead of through leaky abstractions) but without a way to transition off QuickDraw, it felt like more busywork that had to be done just to keep up. https://eclecticlight.co/2024/06/01/pdf-on-macs-the-rise-and-fall-of-preview/ https://eclecticlight.co/2024/06/01/pdf-on-macs-the-rise-and... Apple seems to have lost its academic roots, and suffers for it now. Or I should say, its customers suffer while it grosses almost half a trillion dollars per year. At least with vibe coding we can just whip up a Preview app in an afternoon, so maybe none of this matters anymore.

leoc 6mo ago

For anyone who wants to type or paste into the Code textarea: * https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/papers/BLUEBOOK.pdf https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/papers/BLUEBOOK.pdf The PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (the "Blue Book") (principally) by Linda Gass and John Deubert, 1986 (ISBN 0-201-10179-3) * https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf The PostScript Language Reference (third ed.—a later edition of the "Red Book") (principally) by Ed Taft, Steve Chernicoff and Caroline Rose, 1999 (ISBN 0-201-27922-8) * https://connor.zip/resources/pdfs/adobe-green-book.pdf https://connor.zip/resources/pdfs/adobe-green-book.pdf PostScript Language Program Design (the "Green Book") by (principally) by Glenn Reid, 1988 (ISBN 0-201-14396-8). A zipfile with Green Book code files: https://web.archive.org/web/20110613223722/http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/sdk/sample/GreenBook.zip https://web.archive.org/web/20110613223722/http://partners.a... (At first my retro-ps tab got itself into a state in which it would not run any code entered into the Code textarea, instead timing out and returning an error; and since page reload is soft-disabled you'll have to either force a reload or open a new tab. Also, since the Abobe sample code uses indentation extensively—for example the Blue Book's official "hello world" program is newpath 144 72 moveto 144 432 lineto stroke showpage —it would be nice if the Code textarea handled Tab keyboard inputs. )

leoc 6mo ago
Some pages with more PostScript book recommendations and sometimes links (I'm no authority myself): https://luc.devroye.org/lucbps.html https://luc.devroye.org/lucbps.html https://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/psdocs/Books.html https://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/psdocs/Books.html https://gist.github.com/jpluimers/9a50d0ba14fe975906ea8788a352e269 https://gist.github.com/jpluimers/9a50d0ba14fe975906ea8788a3...

DonHopkins 6mo ago

[dead]

giannicmptr1000 6mo ago

can't wait until adobe goes away... almost

ardline 6mo ago

Solid work. The devil's in the operational complexity, but this looks manageable.