Such a shame that macOS lost all its built-in postscript support including Preview.app in recent versions :(
Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#22Such a shame that macOS lost all its built-in postscript support including Preview.app in recent versions :(
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?
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#23Such a shame that macOS lost all its built-in postscript support including Preview.app in recent versions :(
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?
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#24Such 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.
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#25> 502 Bad Gateway People must really love PostScript!
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 :'(
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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
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...
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.
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Owen Densmore's work with Bill Atkinson and John Warnock on the Mac printing system, and his "linguistic motherboard" email an…
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.
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.
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#28For 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
newpath
144 72 moveto
144 432 lineto
stroke
showpage
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Details here: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/09/25/postscripts-sudden-death...
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 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…
> .. with vibe coding we can just whip up a Preview app
why deflate your own position with this (worthless-untrue-spineless) statement? Which library is doing the work? who writes that library and maintains it?
Re: Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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…
> .. with vibe coding we can just whip up a Preview app why deflate your own position with this (worthless-untrue-spineless) statement? Which library is doing the work? who writes that library and maintains it?
I don't know if it was done in an afternoon, but...
https://github.com/mist64/retro-ps
Author: Claude, directed by Michael Steil .