What are the advantages of PostScript vs Asymptote?

Bill Casselman is an amazing mathematician with a diversity of interests. As this makes clear, he's been embracing computation and computational mathematics "since before it was cool." He also has an interest in mathematical history, and travelled to India to see the oldest-known occurrence of 0 (https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-indi...). I'm sure he has tons of other interests about which I don't know.

As cool as this is, I think most folks would find the newer tools:

- Asymptote

- Eukleides

- TikZ

- METAPOST

- Nodebox

- OpenSCAD --- see the book series: Geometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make Trigonometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123127774-make Calculus: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61739368-make

of greater interest (and for the Pythonistas there is: https://pythonscad.org/ ) --- I'd be interested to know of other tools in this space.

That said, most folks just use Inkscape (though at least it has scripting): https://inkscape.org/~pakin/%E2%98%85simple-inkscape-scripti...

Maybe Graphite will spur interest?

What a delight! Thanks for the link.

Is there a single giant PDF for this?

Haha! I used to do LOTS of work in PostScript. The biggest project was a system which was part Python for the management, but PS for the content of a database publishing engine, motivated by the the need to generate crazily complicated real estate books, back in the day. There was a whole huge template system for different kinds of commercial and residential property and all sorts of different sections, ranges and indices. It was responsible for generating hundreds of multi-hundred page documents per day for dozens of real estate boards across Western Canada. Each publication was about as complicated as a Yellow Pages and generated daily and automatically from ever-changing data. In fact, the underlying database schema could evolve automatically through the update mechanisms in RETS (the Real Estate Transaction System API), though that was on the Python side. The rendering happened using GhostScript out to PDF for printing and electronic distribution to realtors. A stupid amount of detail, but what else is a touch of the 'tsim for anyway?!?

My other PostScript stuff was mostly fun and experimental: some fractal hacks which made printers and typesetters groan and some collaborative knowledge visualization stuff. I got started with PostScript on my NextStation in 1991 and it served me well, being the basis of a whole career of programmatic visualization.

Here is the three original Postscript Books. They are the classic way to learn PS.

The Blue Book (Tutorial and Cookbook) https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse

The Red Book (Language Reference) https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse_l1h3

The Green Book (Language Design) https://archive.org/details/PSGreenBook

This book is awesome and I've been inspired by it for awhile. I used to love whipping up diagrams and simple vector art in .ps/.eps files. In a fit of procrastination in ~2006 I created a minimalist horizontal rule for an IEEE conference submission, and that diamondrule.eps[1] has now become the standard. I would say that EPS is still more convenient than SVG as a format to contain, in one self-contained file, raster graphics with overlaid vector graphics.

Like others[2] I was saddened that Mac's Preview program stopped opening .ps/.eps files with the release of Ventura in late 2022. I never understood exactly why; I guess security issues around the PostScript interpreter. But that made it lot less convenient to hack around in .ps files. Ghostscript's interactive display program(s?) never seemed as convenient as Preview.

[1] https://github.com/ieeevgtc/tvcg-journal-latex/blob/main/dia...

[2] https://tidbits.com/2022/10/27/preview-in-ventura-drops-supp...