Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser

(pagetable.com)

24 points | by ingve an hour ago ago

10 comments

  • tnelsond4 6 minutes ago 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.

  • thomasfl 4 minutes ago ago

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

  • gnerd00 5 minutes ago 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.

  • 1f60c an hour ago ago

    > 502 Bad Gateway

    People must really love PostScript!

    • arethuza 7 minutes ago 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 27 minutes ago 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

      • macintux 22 minutes ago 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 12 minutes ago ago

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

  • panick21_ 22 minutes ago ago

    Sun NeWS in the browser would be cool as well.