Why “direct” PostScript makes sense • Hacker News Board

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#21

Post by salvadors » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 5:19 PM UTC

mhd wrote: post #7

Craiggybear wrote: post #4

I like hand-coding PostScript. Been doing it since the early 90's. It doesn't need to be a mess and can be beautifully concise and clean. It does have some odd ideas for the beginner (the page always starts at the bottom left coordinate and goes up, not down) but that's not hard. Its a very cool language -- Forth derived.

I remember back in the days of "early" Linux, when printer drivers were still a bit rare, there was lots of software that generated somewhat readable PS, i.e. the programmers wrote it and then used it as a template, like you'd be using HTML templates nowadays. The timetables for a German railway info site did that. And I made heavy use of Jamie Zawinski's audio-tape.ps [1] back then. Never got through Thinking in Pos…

Wow. I'd completely forgotten about audio-tape.ps. It had all sorts of nifty built-in graphics for various bands, and I remember learning way more than I ever expected to want to know about PostScript adding similar customisations for others.

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#22

Post by bitwize » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 5:32 PM UTC

When I wanted to investigate fractals using Scheme, I had the Scheme program spit out PostScript output, then ran it through gs to look at the results.

PostScript is really tractable as a language to work directly in. Basic line-drawing stuff is almost as simple as the Logo I played with as a kid.

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#23

Post by krupan » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 5:33 PM UTC

That's a whole lot of text with very, very few code examples. Is the code too scary to show us more?

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#24

Post by DennisP » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 6:26 PM UTC

gilgameshi wrote: post #17

Killed because it was very copyrighted... Time to move on guys. Any newer ideas?

Ghostscript runs postscript and is opensource.

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#25

Post by DennisP » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 6:31 PM UTC

It'd be really cool to have an ebook reader that converts epub files, and runs either TEX directly or postscript implementing the TEX paragraph formatter.

It's really bugging me that my kindle is incapable of running Knuth's algorithm, preferring instead to avoid hyphenation entirely, serving up an ugly hodgepodge of justified and ragged-right text. C'mon guys, this is old stuff...

Any open hardware with e-ink?

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#26

Post by plt » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 7:39 PM UTC

gallerytungsten wrote: post #15

chalst wrote: post #8

PDF displaced Postscript for two reasons: (i) lower resource usage, and (ii) better handling of fonts. Since then PDF has become more sophisticated, handling metadata, tagging, and embedding media. It's been a long time since Postscript has been "the universal language for graphical and printed work". A shame, since Postscript is fun.

re: "PDF displaced Postscript." Not exactly. A PDF is generated from PostScript, as noted in the article: "A PDF file is a static representation of the result of executing the PostScript file on a single occasion." A PDF is a more compact version of a PostScript file - we could call it compiled PostScript, to use a term many on this site are familiar with. Just as a compiler has many output options, distilling PostSc…

PDF is typically directly generated these days. There's no need to generate it from PostScript first.

The main difference between the two is that PDF is a declarative definition of the page whereas PostScript is a turing complete language. You can write a PostScript ray-tracer which will execute on the printer itself something which would never be possible in PDF. On the flip side, PDF is far more efficient as an electronic document format.

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#27

Post by mattlong » Fri, Dec 09, 2011, 7:59 PM UTC

gallerytungsten wrote: post #15

chalst wrote: post #8

PDF displaced Postscript for two reasons: (i) lower resource usage, and (ii) better handling of fonts. Since then PDF has become more sophisticated, handling metadata, tagging, and embedding media. It's been a long time since Postscript has been "the universal language for graphical and printed work". A shame, since Postscript is fun.

re: "PDF displaced Postscript." Not exactly. A PDF is generated from PostScript, as noted in the article: "A PDF file is a static representation of the result of executing the PostScript file on a single occasion." A PDF is a more compact version of a PostScript file - we could call it compiled PostScript, to use a term many on this site are familiar with. Just as a compiler has many output options, distilling PostSc…

No, PDFs don't have to be generated from PS at all. PDF has it's own well-defined spec. Valid PDF files can be generated in many ways besides from PS files. It's even possible to write a valid PDF file by hand if you're feeling masochistic.

Re: Why “direct” PostScript makes sense

#28

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, Dec 10, 2011, 12:41 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #25

It'd be really cool to have an ebook reader that converts epub files, and runs either TEX directly or postscript implementing the TEX paragraph formatter. It's really bugging me that my kindle is incapable of running Knuth's algorithm, preferring instead to avoid hyphenation entirely, serving up an ugly hodgepodge of justified and ragged-right text. C'mon guys, this is old stuff... Any open hardware with e-ink?

Sadly the iRex Technologies Illiad is no longer available (but it met your criteria)