[HN Gopher] How PostScript kickstarted desktop publishing ___________________________________________________________________ How PostScript kickstarted desktop publishing Author : mfiguiere Score : 29 points Date : 2022-12-08 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org) (TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org) | kkfx wrote: | PostScript have followed some previous ideas but the most | important part is a thing lost in modern software: a programming | language to create documents AND applications at the same time. A | kind of document UI years after Xerox. | | Modern publishing software have ditched this approach for | another, a fully visually one, formally easier, sometimes easier, | but in general limited and limiting. | PopAlongKid wrote: | My first "desktop publishing" experience was using troff on Unix | and sending output to the university's phototypsetter. Then, in | the second half of the 1980s, I worked at a Fortune 200 company | in the team rolling out PCs and networks across the company's | many locations. | | At the time, the basic choice was the HP laserjet with optional | font cartridges (which were very expensive as I recall, something | like $200 each in 1980s dollars), or the Apple laserwriter which | was something like $4K if I recall correctly, but had Postscript | built in, so no need for hardware font cartridges. | | So as a result, the HP hardware got rolled out to most offices | where mostly what was needed was to print memos in default | monospace font, while to make a nice looking newsletter, flyer, | or brochure, you had to travel to headquarters to use the Apple | printer. | dhosek wrote: | My first printer was an HP LJ II+ with the PostScript | cartridge. I had to buy extra RAM for it and for a while, I had | more RAM in my printer than in my computer. A few years later, | I bought a fancier PS printer that printed ledger size pages | and handled duplex and again I had more RAM in my printer than | in my computer. I used to occasionally write PS documents by | hand (one was to print out country placards for the Model | United Nations club at my college where for country names which | were especially long, the text would be auto condensed. | | These days, with the advent of printing subsystems in the GUI | and the fact that software no longer needs to handle the | printer directly, I don't know if anyone ever buys PS printers | at all anymore. | the-printer wrote: | I was delighted to discover a full chapter dedicated to troff | in a textbook I picked up on Berkeley Unix. Raw documents | written in troff (the ones that I've seen) seem so quaint. Like | little homemade chicken pot pies. | | I'm mixed on the state of desktop publishing today. I'm missing | that quaintness. | the-printer wrote: | For more discussion from an earlier iteration of this article: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33820907 ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-08 23:00 UTC)