Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
51 points
2 hours ago
| 8 comments
| pagetable.com
| HN
jeffrallen
1 minute ago
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[delayed]
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1f60c
2 hours ago
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> 502 Bad Gateway

People must really love PostScript!

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arethuza
1 hour ago
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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.

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DonHopkins
1 hour ago
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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

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macintux
1 hour ago
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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.
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ale42
1 hour ago
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They were silently sent to the client browsers... ;-)
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tnelsond4
1 hour ago
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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.

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sgt
1 hour ago
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Dropped a .ps in there, it's just stuck "rendering".
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stuaxo
1 hour ago
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Wonderful.
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panick21_
1 hour ago
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Sun NeWS in the browser would be cool as well.
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DonHopkins
1 hour ago
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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...

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gnerd00
1 hour ago
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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.
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thomasfl
1 hour ago
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How much does a subscription for this website costs per month? After all it says Adobe in the title.
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