PostScript language tutorial and cookbook
by Adobe Systems Inc. · first published 1985
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2recommended by
5HN commenters
2015–2026first – last mentioned
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This describes how to use the Postscript programming language that was developed by Adobe. It has many examples in the tutorial & "Cookbook". The term cookbook is very well used here, as it describes how to "cook" the recepes to make the printer do what you want.
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I liked programming in PostScript more than Forth because of all the additional non-graphic things it had. Look at the Blue Book ("The PostScript® Language Tutorial and Cookbook") http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/sample/ind... for some examples.
on “Starting Forth” ↗If you go the PostScript route then check out the PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (blue book). It is available in a lot of places on the net and quite a nice tutorial.
on “Live Coding in Sporth: A Stack-Based Language for Audio Synthesis [pdf]” ↗When you want to learn it, I recommend the "Blue Book", aka "PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook" By Adobe Systems Incorporated. It's a very thin book, but a great tutorial and example reference. I enjoyed going through it, and still occasionally generate PostScript for visualizations.
on “Minimal PDF” ↗For anyone who wants to type or paste into the Code textarea: * https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/papers/BLUEBOOK.pdf The PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (the "Blue Book") (principally) by Linda Gass and John Deubert, 1986 (ISBN 0-201-10179-3) * https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf The PostScript Language Reference (third ed.) (principally)…
on “Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser” ↗Two interesting documents produced with Scribe were the 1985 editions of Adobe’s red and blue books, the PostScript Language Reference Manual and PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook, published by Addison-Wesley. The colophon in the blue book explains the publishing workflow: Camera-ready copy for this book was created entirely with PostScript and printed on a Linotron 101 at…
on “Scribe: A document specification language and its compiler (1980) [pdf]” ↗They are also available free online -- "PostScript Language Tutorial & Cookbook", also known as the PostScript Blue Book, is at https://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF. There is also the Red Book (useful to fully understand the language, to the point of writing a PostScript interpreter), and Green Book (more of a reference book than a cookbook).
on “The perfect programming language” ↗