Tech

Adobe’s PostScript programming language sparked a revolution. Now you can check the source code


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Getty Images/Nitat Termmee

The Computer History Museum (CHM), with permission from Adobe, has released the source code for the first version of PostScript, a programming language developed by Adobe in the early 1980s that helped opens up desktop publishing and generates Portable Document Format (PDF).

“PostScript and Adobe Type Library revolutionized printing and publishing, and kicked off the explosive growth of desktop publishing that began in the 1980s,” CHM said.

Adobe released the first PostScript release in 1984, two years after the company was founded, and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs approached the company to make PostScript useful for laser printers. emerging, was first developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Apple launched the nearly $7,000 LaserWriter printer unit with integrated PostScript in 1985, helping spark the desktop printing boom.

As noted by David C. Brock, director of management affairs at CHM and director of the Center for Software History, Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock – architects of PostScript – has begun discussions with Digital Equipment Corporation and Apple about the new digital use of software. newspaper.

“Their vision: Any computer can connect to printers and typewriters through a common language to print words and images with the highest fidelity,” write Brock.

“By treating everything printed as the same, according to a conventional mathematical description, PostScript grants capabilities nowhere else. Text and images can be scaled, rotated, and moved at will. ,” he later added.

Another step forward by Adobe is professional-quality typefaces for use in PostScript. Adobe’s PDF file format, standardized in 2008, is also based on PostScript and has today replaced PostScript as the cross-platform document sharing format.

Before founding Adobe, Geschke, Warnock and others worked together at Xerox PARC, where they developed Interpress, which Xerox decided would be its printing standard. But due to the delay in doing that, Geschke and Warnock decided to leave and start Adobe to create their rival to Interpress. The pair also attracted other key talent from PARC to join Adobe and work on PostScript.

As Brock notes, Adobe has approached typography and fonts differently than PARC. But the development team at Adobe has yet to figure out how to give PostScript “device independence”.

Warnock and his colleagues appear to have solved the problem with a set of text rendering procedures that remained secret in PostScript’s source code until he publicly disclosed their existence in 2010. .

Geschke noted in an interview with CHM that PostScript was developed in the days before the software was patented.

“We won’t even apply for a patent, because to apply for a patent you have to disclose and we don’t want to disclose it because that’s really a miracle in terms of implementation,” he explains. Our PostScript”.

Acorn to Brick, the PostScript source code that CHM has released is a version of PostScript since 1984.

“Although this version contains an early version of the ‘font hinting’ process that was later kept commercially secret, these approaches have been completely rewritten, extended, and refined by Bill Paxton in the These changes are critical to the success of PostScript as it is fully marketed,” Brock explained.

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