Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1854

41•ingve•2h ago

Comments

1f60c•1h ago

> 502 Bad Gateway

People must really love PostScript!

DonHopkins•1h ago

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 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

macintux•1h ago

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.

ale42•51m ago

They were silently sent to the client browsers... ;-)

arethuza•46m ago

I really liked developing in PostScript within NeWS... had quite a lispy interactive feeling to it.

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.

panick21_•1h ago

Sun NeWS in the browser would be cool as well.

DonHopkins•58m ago

Pre-web, and using the NeWS version UniPress Emacs 2.20 (Gosling Emacs, aka NeMACS) as the authoring tool:

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...

tnelsond4•46m ago

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.

gnerd00•45m ago

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.

thomasfl•43m ago

How much does a subscription for this website costs per month? After all it says Adobe in the title.

stuaxo•35m ago

Wonderful.

sgt•23m ago

Dropped a .ps in there, it's just stuck "rendering".

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Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser

Comments

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