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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I learned PostScript in 1988 by studying the Illustrator file format (which eventually became the basis of PDF). It seemed like something from the future given how unavailable high-resolution graphics were at the time. Without Pagemaker + PostScript Apple would have gone under much sooner, and never would have become what it is now. At the same time learning PostScript with reams of paper and basically no tools was a giant pain in the ass.

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My father taught himself postscript in the late 80s (it was on the Mac SE). With it and Microsoft Word with a "secret" PostScript style (a particular combination of font, size, italics, underlining, and hidden) allowed him to create a high quality header for a Microsoft Word doc.

With it, copied that document and printed it and the university's letterhead was nicely at the top - scaled to any size. It worked just as well on 8x10 as it did on cardstock that was to be sent out.

It cut down on the cost for printing for the department because they didn't have to buy as much of the letterhead pre-printed paper. Saved on time too since you just printed it rather than needing to load one special sheet and then print the rest.

He saved the stack of paper that he used to learn with for a while. Got four tests per page (four edges and flip). The red book for PostScript laid on top of it.

That brings back memories. I did almost exactly the same thing, but I created a Postscript program to render a "Common Seal" stamp, that through some process unknown to me could be converted from the printout to an actual stamp. It was all circular, the text was rendered on a path (a circle) and automatically scaled to fit. I used a lot of paper writing that, I went a little further and moved the image to different positions on the page so I could get more than four tests on a page, but still a large amount of paper in the end. I'd forgotten about the Microsoft Word special style that made it all possible.

So when I got to use a NextStation with Preview.app, that was a huge revelation, interactive postscript.

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