OT: PC World are useless - was Re: [Gllug] OT: microdirect.co.ukreliable?

[Peter Childs]

Richard Jones wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 05:42:20PM -0000, Gary Pownall wrote:
>  
>
>>What is Postscript by the way?
>>    
>>
>
>[In addition to Tet's response ...]
>
>The fun thing about Postscript is that it's a full programming
>language.  It's stack-based, a little like Forth.  Quite easy to
>learn, if you get Adobe's "Red Book" (now available for free from
>http://www.adobe.com/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf ).
>
>Try sending this file: http://annexia.org/tmp/fern.ps to a Postscript
>printer (or to 'gv' if you're not rich enough to have a PS printer).
>The file originally appeared in Byte magazine, circa 1991.  It's only
>18 lines / 828 bytes long.  In Googling around, I've even found that
>there was an obfuscated Postscript competition held in 1993; you can
>find the results here:
>http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/contrib/postscript/obfuscated-1993/
>('labyrinth.ps' is my favorite).
>
>The ubiquitous PDF is derived from Postscript, by dumping all the
>programming language features, so that the interpreter can be made
>simpler and smaller.  Not that Acrobat is actually simpler or smaller.
>This also allows for sensible searching, not really easy (or even
>possible[?]) in general for Postscript files.
>
>Rich.
>
>  
>
    pdf files are compressed I think, where as you can write postscript 
in a text editor you'll have fun writing pdf I think.
   
    I like the postscript idea of templates, There is no reason why it 
could not be used as the language for saving from a word processor of 
some sort, Which would be a very nice feature. Its also a pitty that 
most printers can't handle templates, and Ghostscript can't either.

    Now why has nobody written this yet.

    Please correct me if I'm wrong,

Peter Childs.
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