* 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)
(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
Preview.app in NeXTstep used to have a postscript window where you could type in postscript (or paste it in) and interactively work with it. It was an essential development tool to help write postscript before including it in a source code file as a pswrap.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :'(
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.
For anyone who wants to type or paste into the Code textarea:
* 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 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 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.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
—it would be nice if the Code textarea handled Tab keyboard inputs. )
Such a shame that macOS lost all its built-in postscript support including Preview.app in recent versions :(
Preview.app in NeXTstep used to have a postscript window where you could type in postscript (or paste it in) and interactively work with it. It was an essential development tool to help write postscript before including it in a source code file as a pswrap.
This is the single reason I have not upgraded from OS 12.x. Postscript is key to many of my workflows.
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?
Details here: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/09/25/postscripts-sudden-death...
6 replies →
Solid work. The devil's in the operational complexity, but this looks manageable.
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.
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
Minus the colors, they worked and look pretty good.
It did a nice job on the classic NeWS "PostScript for Poets" t-shirt!
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/pictures/teesh...
> 502 Bad Gateway
People must really love PostScript!
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=37201231
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.
3 replies →
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-datastr...
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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.
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 :'(
Dropped a .ps in there, it's just stuck "rendering".
Sun NeWS in the browser would be cool as well.
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-browsi...
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
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
Here's the Emacs NeWS driver, a "C to PostScript" interface file:
https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/Trm...
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.
can't wait until adobe goes away... almost
[dead]
[dead]
Wonderful.
But does it say "PC LOAD LETTER"?
How much does a subscription for this website costs per month? After all it says Adobe in the title.