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?
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?
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.
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.
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 :'(
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.
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:
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 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.
>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.
>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:
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Minus the colors, they worked and look pretty good.
People must really love PostScript!
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.
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 :'(
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 and "Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility" white paper:
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
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster
Don Lancaster has died (gilaherald.com)
https://gilaherald.com/obituary-for-don-lancaster/
HN discussion:
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
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/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/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
>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.
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.
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...