Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser

nticompass•24 minutes ago

I didn't have a PostScript file, so I had to find one. I downloaded the test files from here: http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/postscript.html

Minus the colors, they worked and look pretty good.

1f60c•about 5 hours ago

> 502 Bad Gateway

People must really love PostScript!

arethuza•about 4 hours 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.

DonHopkins•about 5 hours 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

kenshi•about 2 hours ago

Thanks for posting this!

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...

horacemorace•35 minutes ago

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.

macintux•about 5 hours 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•about 4 hours ago

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

jeffrallen•about 3 hours ago

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.

tnelsond4•about 4 hours 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.

sgt•about 4 hours ago

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

gnerd00•about 4 hours 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.

panick21_•about 5 hours ago

Sun NeWS in the browser would be cool as well.

DonHopkins•about 4 hours 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