My Journey to PostScript

In June 2023, I started to write an interpreter for PostScript, a rather surprising low level language. This blog tells the story of the adventure. The result is a web app in Javascript that can render a subset of PlostScript to PNG, SVG and PDF.

Gallery some graphic experimentations
TinyPS what the interpreter can do and how you can install ist
Sandbox play with the interpreter
Exercices programming exercises

Professor Brailsford demonstrates in this short video the basic concepts of Postscript as a programming language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_NXz7I5dQc&t=779s

Donald E. Knuth on fonts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRTZoGiFNU

Book project

My own newspaper - How I got into typography
Engineering - my girlfriend had an HP calculator
Mac Laserwriter PageMaker - how I got into computers
4 3 add 2 mul - PostScript as a programming language
Sidenote - a simple Javascript console
Dictionary - defining new operators
If then else - control structures
(Strings) and arrays
Sidenote - unit test
We need to talk about garbage collection
Preparing the white page
100 100 moveto 200 300 lineto stroke
The scanfill algorithm
Bezier curves
Rethinking stroke
Scale rotate translate - Transform the user space
Implementing Transform
Fixing scanFill overboarding
Get locality with graphics and dictionary stack
Working with fonts
100 100 moveto (Hello World) show
Exploring our font library
A bug in the stroke algorithm
Get font outlines
Align left, center, right and justify text
A first attempt to wrap paragraphs
Oversampling
Render to HTML canvas and to PNG
Render PostScript to SVG
Render PostScript to PDF
SVG as text experiments
Parsing a TrueType font
Perfecting TrueType parsing
Composite glyphs
Including TrueType to the codebase
PDF as text
Adding images
Colors
Clipping
Transparency - extending PostScript
Melting dots - Raster algorithm
Unicode - extending PostScript
Back to paper with a plotter
Back to analog linocut printing