!@#$% postscript

[mdlbear]

Whoever thought a Turing-complete low-level programming language was the right way to send page-sized images to a printer ought to be taken out and strangled. Slowly.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

Did someone send the “calculate the Mandelbrot Set at 300dpi” program to the printer?

[mdlbear]

Google maps

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

so who committed what abomination in PostScript™?

[mdlbear]

Google maps, this time, but any large image takes way too long.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Is the printer pure PostScript, or is it an HP or something that will take PCL as well?

[mdlbear]

It probably takes both, but even my HP inkjet has problems with images. More likely rendering time on the server, though now that I think about it, it could be the USB interface.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

It was a good idea at the time...

[kendaer.livejournal.com]

Whoever thought a Turing-complete low-level programming language modelled on RPN was the right way to send page-sized images to a printer out to be taken out and strangled force fed their intestines. Slowly.

I noticed a couple of errors in your statement.. I've helpfully corrected them :)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* have a few opinions about such things? :)

Funny, back in PostScript's salad days we never had much of a problem with it.... I remember the *printer interface* being the issue. We had an HP4M with PostScript on a cartridge. It was originally hung off a parallel interface on an IBM PowerPC. After a while we got a JetDirect card and hung it off our 10baseT network, and we ran a test. We had a satellite image file, which, converted to PostScript, was about a meg. Trickling down from the parallel interface, it took 15 minutes for the printer to process the thing and print. Printing the same image by feeding it from that same AIX box across the network to the Solaris box hosting the JetDirect queue and *back* across the network to the JetDirect card in the HP4M, time to print? Sixty seconds flat. 'course, these days, 1ppm is dog-slow, even for inkjet... but this was 1992. (the 4M had the Minolta print engine in it; once fonts were downloaded, it would do 20ppm of text sustained...)

I always thought RPN was kinda cool. Done right, you don't need parentheses... which makes the parser a lot easier. It also helped us Fuzzy Bees tell the real engineers from the wannabes... us real engineers carried HP11C's, which grokked RPN. Wannabes carried TI's with paren keys.

But, yeah. Not sure a fully-functional programming language is really necessary for just printing.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

And being Turing-complete, IT WILL NEVER DIE. There just isn't a killer feature or function which can't be replicated, given enough programmer time and alcohol.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

Confession: I spent a number of years thinking Forth was the greatest programming language ever. (For personal projects, that is, using it in a shared environment gave me nightmares even at the height of my infatuation.) This led very directly to doing some interesting things with PostScript directly.

[mdlbear]

Sun actually implemented Display Postscript -- an absolute raving security nightmare that was, thankfully, supplanted by X11.

Jobs used it on the Next, and it has since resurfaced as Display PDF in MacOS X. PDF eliminated the Turing-completeness, but Adobe has since put it back in the form of Javascript. IDIOTS!

As it turns out, a 300dpi JPEG 2000 file is roughly the same size as the equivalent PDF, and contains nothing but an image.

[brmj.livejournal.com]

Here's your culprit, or at least one of them:
From Wikipedia: "...At about this time they were visited by Steve Jobs, who urged them to adapt PostScript to be used as the language for driving laser printers..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't that be "adopt"? Or is it a derivative of PostScript?

Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody