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DIRECT POSTSCRIPT
from a BL point of view

By Mikkel Meinike Nielsen
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The view point of this text is a Linux distribution called 'Basic Linux' it is a minimalistic distribution good for older computers especially older laptop computers.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/

The beginning of this is an interest in making usable computers out of older computers, especially older laptop computers with the operating system Linux. For me a usable computer needs a good word processing or typesetting system. That have not bin the easiest thing to find. Abiword has bin around for a while as WYSIWYG word processor for Linux with the lowest capability demands. Abiword is good, but some things I want to do I can not do in Abiword and the one of my two laptop computers are not even capable of ruining Abiword, so I have bin looking for something else. I found out about Groff a text setting system where you type in your text in a plan text editor using some mark-up-languish (offen looking like this .FT or .TT or .P ) to indicate how the text should be formatted. Than you process the text file through groff with a command like this

groff my.txt >my.ps

and out comes a formatted file ready to print. The system is very small. You can contain it as a tar archive on one single floppy and it is very capable and actually it was through the Groff mailing list that my attention was drown to yet an other possibility for typesetting in Linux. The possibility that this text is about. Direct PostScript for typesetting.
PostScript is a programming languish like C or Perl or Java. That, in it self is, scarring at lest for me, but some good people have programmed small routines in PostScript that sort of built a word processor inside the PostScript program. or put in other words, you have the word processor inside your document. It is lot of pre-programmed PostScript routines that you can call with a single word or a small letter combination so you have a mark-up-languish. You have the source code of your word processor laying visible together with the source code for your final printout in one plain text file. I think that this is a quit fascinating construction. So you open your PostScript program in your favourite text editor and you are faced with the source code of everything you got; The coding's for the mark-up-languich that you copied in to to the file, the fonts that you using represented as endless lines of numbers or as postscript coding, any images that you use again represented as endless lines of numbers. That means you will have to find the right place in between all this coding to start typesetting your document, but once you have found that place everything is quit simple if you use this pre-build routines that I have talked about. You type in your text in berries and follow that with a single character or two to decide on the justification you want for that text. Like this:

(A long paragraph with several lines ) w

Will come out "word wrapped" to the printer or to "ghostview" (GV) All you will need to have on your BL system is Ghostscript (GS), the gs-font and GV (remember GS comes in two versions in SW 4 one for svga and one fore X11). One very special thing about direct PostScript typesetting is that you are platform independent. If your old laptop breaks and you have the file on floppy you can take your floppy to the public library and use a windows machine (actually I don't know how you preview PostScript in windows but there must be some adobe program that does this. And then the typesetting (images setting) capability of direct PostScript typesetting is fare more powerful then for instance Abiword. It is like having Adobe Pagemaker on your small BL system, but then you will have to get in to real PostScript programming.

I have followed this book written by David Byram-Wigfield to set up my own formatting codes.

http://www.cappella.demon.co.uk/bookpdfs/pracpost.pdf

But David Byram-Wigfield have also made such a pre-programmed mark-up-langue that I have talked about earlier in this text. It is called The tiny dict and you will find the actual text file with the coding here:

http://www.cappella.demon.co.uk/tinyfiles/tinydict.html

To support users of the Tinydict David Byram-Wigfield have made a whole book called The Tiny Guide and this too is freely available as pdf :

http://www.cappella.demon.co.uk/tinyfiles/e-guide.pdf


NOTES

Of-topic note on BL 3 and sound: I have a very old laptop computer (compaq conture 4/25) with only 8 mb ram, 25 MZH processor, 200 MB hard disk and no sound card. It is possible to make this computer play wav (sound/music) files though the pc speaker (the one that says “beep” at boot time). It is bad quality, but sometimes very usefully (or at least it is quit funny). Basic Linux doesn't come with this feature but it can be added. If you like to do this contact me and I will send you the files you'll need for this plus an instruction.

Note for Danish readers about a good Danish book on PostScrit programming:
Der findes en rigtig god dansk bog om PostScript programmering. Den er fra 1990. Den er skrevet af en forfatter som også skriver digte og romaner og har en lidt anden stil end sådan tørre teknik bøger. Den er bygget op over en masse konkrete eksempler som forklares. Forfatteren hedder Erwin Neutzsky-Wulf. Bogen hedder Postscript programmering, forlag Borgen, ISBN 87-418-8940-1. Den kan bestilles til dit lokale bibliotek. Tak til Martin Møller Pedersen fra 'sslugs' forum for at oplyse mig om eksistensen af denne bog.


/Mikkel


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