My Journey to PostScript

In June 2023, I started to write an interpreter for PostScript, a rather surprising low level language. This blog tells the story of the adventure. The result is a web component in Javascript that can render a subset of PlostScript to PNG, SVG and PDF.

tiny-ps A web component to display PostScript graphics inside HTML
Examples and sandbox https://belle-nuit.com/site/files/minimal14.html

These examples use the old version of tiny-ps. They will be migrated soon
Gallery some graphic experimentations
Exercices programming exercises

Professor Brailsford demonstrates in this short video the basic concepts of Postscript as a programming language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_NXz7I5dQc&t=779s

Donald E. Knuth on fonts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRTZoGiFNU

Book project

• My own newspaper - How I got into typography
• Engineering - my girlfriend had an HP calculator
• Mac Laserwriter PageMaker - how I got into computers
• 4 3 add 2 mul - PostScript as a programming language
• Sidenote - a simple Javascript console
• Dictionary - defining new operators
• If then else - control structures
• (Strings) and arrays
• Sidenote - unit test
• We need to talk about garbage collection
• Preparing the white page
• 100 100 moveto 200 300 lineto stroke
• The scanfill algorithm
• Bezier curves
• Rethinking stroke
• Scale rotate translate - Transform the user space
• Implementing Transform
• Fixing scanFill overboarding
• Get locality with graphics and dictionary stack
• Working with fonts
• 100 100 moveto (Hello World) show
• Exploring our font library
• A bug in the stroke algorithm
• Get font outlines
• Align left, center, right and justify text
• A first attempt to wrap paragraphs
• Oversampling
• Render to HTML canvas and to PNG
• Render PostScript to SVG
• Render PostScript to PDF
• SVG as text experiments
• Parsing a TrueType font
• Perfecting TrueType parsing
• Composite glyphs
• Including TrueType to the codebase
• Text mode second try
• Text mode PDF
• Colors and transparency
• Transparency does not work with Stroke
• Textbook exercices
• Zero winding vs. even odd rule
• Implementing zero winding
• Clipping
• Curiosité 24 25
• Multiple pages
• Glyph oddities
• A web component called tiny-ps
• Offset Bezier curves
• Adding images
• Melting dots - Raster algorithm
• Back to paper with a plotter
• Back to analog linocut printing

Other links on PostScript history

PostScript® LANGUAGE REFERENCE third edition
https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf

A good documentation on the operators can be found here
https://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/psdocs/ref/REF.html

PostScript and Interpress: a comparison (1985)
https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1985/0301.html

A Device Independent Graphics hnaging Model for Use with Raster Devices (1982)
https://www.tech-insider.org/software/research/acrobat/8207.pdf

PostScript - a digital printing press (2022)
https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printing-press/

Notes on the history of PostScript (1998)
https://www.inkguides.com/notes-on-the-history-of-postscript/

INVENTING POSTSCRIPT, THE TECH THAT TOOK THE PAIN OUT OF PRINTING (1988)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/adobe-postscript

PostScript® 1.0 - A Code Study (2024)
https://ztoz.blog/posts/postscript-code/

John E. Warnock: Simple Ideas That Changed Printing and Publishing (2012)
https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/2012-warnock.pdf