25 Sep
2005
25 Sep
'05
1:42 p.m.
Subject: RE: State of the art
From: "Gil Carrick" <gilcarrick at comcast.net>
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 21:43:01 -0500
To: "'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'" <cctalk
at classiccmp.org>
For several years Don Lancaster wrote a column in Computer Shopper extolling
the virtues of PostScript as a programming language. I didn't have the
impression that he was touting the printer as a coprocessor as much as he
was pointing out that since ps qualified as a general purpose programming
language you could do some amazing things with it inside the printer. Not
being heavily into graphics I didn't follow it closely.
Being close or atleast based on Forth stack language it was fun to use the
uVAX in the laps 40 to do things like process and print calculated results.
My favorite was a print job that stayed resident and printed pages as 2up
as a paper saver. Another like that counted pages used since loading.
Allison
25 Sep
25 Sep
3:55 p.m.
For several years Don Lancaster wrote a column in
Computer Shopper
extolling the virtues of PostScript as a programming langauge.
In the 80's there were several computer systems that used
postscript as the visual display medium. Much nicer than any
raster-based description.
PDF is superior in drawing/font primitives but it does not qualify
as a general purpose programming language at all.
SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is very interesting right now. It's
sort-of like graphics in SGML/XML. And you can embed Javascript to
add general-purpose programming. Combined with the web (a couple
browsers like Mozilla can be built with native support for SVG and there
are plug-ins for browsers that aren't as technically advanced) it's
a powerful tool.
Tim.
7044
days inactive
7044
days old
1 comments
2 participants
participants (2)
-
ajp166＠bellatlantic.net -
shoppa_classiccmp＠trailing-edge.com