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Domain: postscript.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to postscript.org.

Comments · 7

  1. Re:What else has Microsoft meant to us... by dvdeug · · Score: 1 · on Is It Wrong to Love Microsoft?

    There was the NeWS system that Sun developed,

    http://www.postscript.org/FAQs/language/node73.htm l says that NeWS started in 1985, the same year as Windows 1.0 and a year after X.

    there were various other GUIs before that.

    But any of significance?

  2. Re:Because.. by isaac · · Score: 4, Informative · on Apple Now Debt Free, Says Internal Memo
    This reminds me of when people give Adobe the credits to developing Display Postcript and NeXT just licensed it. DUH! Without NeXT it wouldn't have come about, let alone Display PDF, etc. Let's give credit for ideas and code where they are due.

    Then you should credit Sun. Their NeWS client-server windowing system (which began development in 1985) used PostScript to describe objects on the screen, but predated NeXT and Adobe's Display PostScript. See http://www.postscript.org/FAQs/language/node73.htm l and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS for corroboration.

    NeWS eventually was absorbed into Sun's OpenLook environment. To this day, Sun's X server supports Display PostScript, as anyone who uses a Sun workstation knows. (A logo to this effect is displayed when the X server starts.)

    I don't mean to belittle NeXT here - I've been a NeXT user for a decade and still have a working NeXTStation TurboColor and NeXTLaser Printer. Display PostScript wasn't really a NeXT innovation, however. (Objective-C on the other hand, was all NeXT)

    -Isaac

  3. Re:Learn PostScript for your diagrams! by Arkaein · · Score: 1 · on Electronic Publishing Using Free Software?
    Just want to say that I spent part of today learning the basics of Postscript and writing (E)PS. All my images really need are high quality stroked lines/paths, triangles, and ellipses, and I've learned enough to all of this in a few hours.

    The tricky part will be maximizung efficiency, because I will have a couple hundred of these images. Because they will be generated in software I don't need to define any Postscript functions if I choose, though there may be cases where simple functions will reduce the size of the file.

    I have also converted the output to pdf using epstopdf, which works great. Now I just need to try out pdflatex and I should be good to go.

    For anyone else who's interested in projects like this, here are some useful links I've found:

    A nice introductory tutorial to Postscript

    The Postscript FAQ

    The Postscript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (The Bluebook) in PDF format (quite comprehensive)

  4. Re:Profound. by scrutty · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Before PDF: John Warnock's 'Camelot'
    Huge NEXSTEP fan that I am I still feel compelled to point out that Display Postscript was Adobe's tech,and licensed by NeXT, and also that Sun NeWS was doing this before Display Postscript.

  5. Timeline by maggard · · Score: 3 · on Third Generation Display Layers Other than OS X?
    Interesting posting regarding NeWS & it's history from someone involved

  6. PostScript by maggard · · Score: 4 · on Third Generation Display Layers Other than OS X?
    PostScript is generally though of as a Page Display Language however it's been applied as a display rendering layer also.

    Sun Microsystems' James Gosling created a displayed PostScript as the basis for NeWS around 1985. This implementation was never particularly Adobe/Apple-PostScript compatible and was only licensed from Adobe shortly before Sun abandoned it. However it was the first use of PostScript for a windowing system.

    NeXT then licensed & underwrote development of PostScript into Display PostScript (no direct relation to displayed PostScript.) This was the basis for NeXT's NextStep interface and lives on today in GNUstep.

    Apple has recently independantly implemented the PostScript-derived PDF from public specifications for it's Quartz rendering layer in it's recently released MacOS X.

    Thus you've a single well known, well documented language that's been used for three independant windowing systems over the course of 15 years, two of them independant of the language's licensors. Add that to it's direct application to printing and it's a pretty powerful argument for further consideration as an X-Window alternative/successor.

  7. Re:OSX vs BSD by peter+hoffman · · Score: 1 · on Darwin Source Completely Available

    Ooops! Mea culpa! You are quite right, that was NeWS, not Display PostScript. I got the following information from the http://www.postscript.org/FAQs/ language/node73.html

    What is NeWS? NeWS (R.I.P.) was Sun Microsystems PostScript-based window system for the Sun Workstation. NeWS was a project within Sun (started around 1985) to create a window system to supplant SunView (a very successful kernel-based window system). NeWS was a client-server model window system (like X) but among many of NeWS novel features was the use of PostScript as the language to describe the appearance of objects on the screen. NeWS had many features in common with Display PostScript, but NeWS predates Adobe Display PostScript and was neither connected with Adobe Display PostScript nor endorsed by Adobe. NeWS was not an Adobe product, nor was it a Sun/Adobe joint venture. As of October 1992, Sun management signed a deal with Adobe to adopt Display PostScript for the Sun. In 1993, Sun finally dropped NeWS altogether. The Sun window system is supposed to start shipping a Display PostScript environment in late 1993.

    -- OpenSourcerers