PostScript: A Digital Printing Press (computerhistory.org)

The Computer History Museum has just announced the release of the source code of the original version of Adobe PostScript (https://info.computerhistory.org/aoc-postscript). It is not open source under the OSI definition, however; there is a license agreement that must be signed to get access to the code, and (among other stipulations) the license only allows non-commercial use, and I don't believe it can be re-uploaded to another site such as GitHub.

I wrote a PostScript interpreter in Javascript four years ago :) Write a program and see it rendered: https://www.ivank.net/veci/pdfi/

PostScript is such a beautiful language! I used to study the PostScript reference manual for hours at a time, in awe of its elegance and perfection:

https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf

How interesting a web would be with embeddable PostScript figures! Yes it's Turing-complete and all, and yes that's no problem: Interpret these figures with a timeout, make the interpretation interruptible, use a sandbox or different threads for rendering etc. HTML+CSS+user interaction is Turing complete as well, and we can still browse the web despite this.

Thank you a lot for PostScript!

This talks about a presentation that was given where the details of font hinting were disclosed. Does anyone know if there is a video available of that?

This didn't mention display postscript, which was used on the NeXT systems (and later on MacOS?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

Too bad most printers today are not capable of interpreting PostScript directly, like they used to back in the day. (Curiously, the microprocessors built into such printers were more powerful than those found in personal computers at the time.)

Some header files seem to be missing from the published code: except.h, framebuf.h, gray.h, reducer.h

In additon, the code is (as expected) written in K&R C, so it won't compile out of the box on a modern system.

Code in TeX, Asciidoc, and/or Markdown, and then create page-layout formats (ePubs, PDFs, and/or PS) and layoutless media like txt, man (groff), and html.

IIRC, the HP LJ4 had to have a special option to print PS directly.

Postscript is one of my favorite languages, Something about stack based languages with simple consistent syntax. I suspect if I had picked up forth before PS it would occupy the same fond spot in my head. but I did not and now I find forths typing awkward, and it lacks the killer feature of postscript, you get to draw pictures.

I love making hand written artisanal postscript. The neatest thing I ever made was a sort of box model, the idea being the main advantage(there are many, but go with me here) of putting your document in html over PS is that html justifies and flows your text. So it was a library where you could specify a box(or a set of linked boxes) for your text area and postscript would auto fold the contained text. The idea was to have all sorts of functions to make it easy to write documents in postscript directly, no one but me actually wants to do this, so it remains a perpetual prototype.

edit: found it, the code is in a sorry state, like I said perpetual prototype, but here is how I did a box model(ish) in PS

https://nl1.outband.net/fossil/misc/file?name=dtp.ps&ci=tip

You can play Zork with an interpreter written in postscript.

http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/interp/zmachine.ps

http://microheaven.com/ozmoo/games/calypso/calypso.z3

    gs -- zmachine.ps calypso.z3

Owen Densmore worked closely with Bill Atkinson at Apple on the PostScript printing system, and with John Warnock at Adobe on the LaserWriter, and at Sun with James Gosling and I and others on the NeWS window system and user interface toolkit.

During his demo of MacPaint, Bill Atkinson called out Owen for writing the printing routines:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqQJ-VnJ2uc&t=10m45s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29295116

>Owen is a brilliant programmer and "User Interface Flower Child", who led the "Print Shop" group at Apple that created the printing architecture for Apple's Lisa and Macintosh hardware, working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers on the LaserWriter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

>NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently:

>used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

>used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering.

>used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456710

DonHopkins on March 1, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-se...

Owen Densmore recounted John Warnock's idea that PostScript was actually a "linguistic motherboard". (This was part of a discussion with Owen about NeFS, which was a proposal for the next version of NFS to run a PostScript interpreter in the kernel. More about that here:)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17077721

Owen Densmore's discussion of John Warnock's "Linguistic Motherboard" idea for PostScript:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/linguistic-motherbo...

    Date: Tue, 20 Feb 90 15:20:52 PST
    From: owen@Sun.COM (Owen Densmore)
    To: don@cs.UMD.EDU
    Subject: Re:  NeFS

    > They changed the meaning of some of the standard PostScript operators,
    > like read and write, which I don't think was a good idea, for several
    > reasons... They should have used different names, or at least made ..

    Agreed.  And I DO see reasons for the old operators.  They could
    be optimized as a local cache for NeFS to use in its own calcs.

    > Basically, NeFS is a *particular* application of an abstraction of
    > NeWS. The abstract idea is that of having a server with a dynamically
    > extensible interpreter as an interface to whatever library or resource
    > you want to make available over the network (let's call it a generic
    > Ne* server).

    Very true.  This has been particularly difficult for me to get across
    to others here at Sun.  I recently wrote it up for Steve MacKay and
    include it at the end of the message.

    > It's not clear to me if NeFS supports multiple light weight PostScript
    > processes like NeWS.

    I asked Brent about this, and he agreed that it's an issue.  Brent
    has been talking to a guy here who's interested in re-writing the
    NeWS interpreter to be much easier to program and debug.  I'd love
    to see them come up with a NeWS Core that could be used as a generic
    NetWare core.

    I think you should send  your comments off to nfs3 & see what happens!
    I agree with most of your points.

    Owen

    ...