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

[Richard Jones]

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.

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