Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tilt_error 952 days ago
It is a pity that PostScript has to live such a dwindling life. It is a very fascinating language in itself. After Display PostScript disappeared, I think the only use is in printers nowadays. I once invested in a development environment for PostScript — psalter — where I could step through code and see contents on the various stacks. I used it when developing overlays on printouts of scanned images, as PostScript files with TIFF content was much smaller than print bitmaps from Windows and LANs weren’t faster than 10 MBit :) It made a huge difference in printout speeds.

I also found a bug in libtiff by studying produced PostScript. I don’t think anybody looks at this anymore.
2 comments
aap_ 952 days ago
The two reasons I don't use postscript directly are lack of alpha blending and no unicode support. Remapping the font to get characters beyond ASCII is too awkward.
link
jhgb 951 days ago
If you specifically target Ghostscript, you do get alpha blending as an extension though, right?
link
WillAdams 952 days ago
I guess the closest thing is METAPOST?

Wishing I could find a more interactive environment for using it than a lualatex document open in a TeX IDE and getting a preview as a PDF which can't be interacted with.

link