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#postscript

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@edsu I jumped on HTML 4 as soon as possible and used to use James Clark’s nsgmls to make sure everything was validated, so I would trip over as few rendering quirks as possible. I also have some #retrocomputing books that will stay with me (some pictured). The ZX Spectrum was my first computer, Foley and Van Dam was comprehensive, writing a #PostScript interpreter on Apollo workstations was my final year project, and I still love the #Z80.

At PARC Chuck Geschke and John Warnock designed the Interpress device-independent page description language supported by Xerox printers and other systems, including Interlisp-D. This work was the foundation for PostScript, which Geschke and Warnock developed at their startup Adobe after leaving PARC.

For a comprehensive introduction to Interpress see:

openlibrary.org/works/OL509285

Open LibraryInterpress, the source book by Steven Harrington | Open LibraryInterpress, the source book by Steven Harrington, unknown edition,
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@simontatham trivial !
Write the text to a .ps file on disk, along with a bit of preamble and call the PostScript pathbbox on the string in the ps file, along with some postamble that writes the dimensions to the log. Then spawn a gv subprocess, parse the output (bonus if you use fgets into a fixed size c string).

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@ics

For me, it was during a lull in my workload at the #IBM Hursley lab in the UK when I worked my way through the O'Reilly #sed & #awk book (the one with the two lorises on the cover).

I'm guessing it was 1995 because my annual birdwatching summary at the start of the next year switched from a fixed column text document to formatting in #Postscript. My first big awk project was to process the underlying data to generate a PS document (something I also learned in the same downtime period).