I've written piles of "Direct PostScript" code for the NeWS window system -- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS</a> ...<p>Pie menu widget:
<a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/piemenu.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/piemenu.ps.txt</a><p>PizzaTool graphical Pizza ordering gui:
<a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/pizzatool.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/pizzatool.ps.txt</a>
Illustration: <a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/pizzatool.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/pizzatool.gif</a><p>VT100 terminal emulator: <a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/newterm.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/newterm.ps.txt</a><p>UniPress (Gosling) Emacs display driver: <a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs.ps.txt</a><p>Metacircular PostScript interpreter:
<a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/ps.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/ps.ps.txt</a><p>PSIBER Space Deck (visual PostScript debugger and programming environment):
<a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/litecyber.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/litecyber.ps.txt</a> More about that: <a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/97</a><p>A lunar lander game James Gosling wrote in 1988: <a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/lander.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/lander.ps.txt</a><p>HeapSort by Owen Densmore:
<a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/heapsort.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/heapsort.ps.txt</a><p>QuickSort by Don Woods (an incredibly twisty maze of stack manipulation, by the Adventure dude):
<a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/quicksort.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/quicksort.ps.txt</a><p>BubbleSort by Bobo Leffler (he was afraid this might come back to haunt him):
<a href="http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/bubblesort.ps.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.donhopkins.com/home/code/bubblesort.ps.txt</a>
Since we're all admitting to have done this at one point in the past, here's mine; PSTab, a guitar tablature typesetter I wrote in 1994. The code is...not great.
<a href="http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/pstab" rel="nofollow">http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/pstab</a><p>I heard from a guy in NZ a while after that he'd used it to typeset a book of banjo music - it was the only software he could find that supported anything other than 6 strings.
PDF displaced Postscript for two reasons: (i) lower resource usage, and (ii) better handling of fonts.<p>Since then PDF has become more sophisticated, handling metadata, tagging, and embedding media. It's been a long time since Postscript has been "the universal language for graphical and printed work".<p>A shame, since Postscript is fun.
My first job out of college, I had a Turbo C compiler, a DEC PC, a database app (government) written in Foxbase, and a Postscript printer. No real reporting tools, so all my reports and add-ons were written in C and outputted Postscript directly to the printer. Was a very interesting learning experience.<p>The Blue and Green books are a must for a new Postscript programmer <a href="http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_archive.html" rel="nofollow">http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/index_arch...</a>
Here's a toy Forth compiler, VM and visual debugger I wrote in PostScript:<p><a href="https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Four.Ps/blob/master/four.ps" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Four.Ps/blob/master/four.ps</a>
A few years ago I took a look at this Unix circuit schematic editor, which seems to be still going strong. Symbols are kept directly in Postscript, if memory serves.<p><a href="http://opencircuitdesign.com/xcircuit/" rel="nofollow">http://opencircuitdesign.com/xcircuit/</a> : <i>"XCircuit regards circuits as inherently hierarchical, and writes both hierarchical PostScript output and hierarchical SPICE netlists."</i>
It'd be really cool to have an ebook reader that converts epub files, and runs either TEX directly or postscript implementing the TEX paragraph formatter.<p>It's really bugging me that my kindle is incapable of running Knuth's algorithm, preferring instead to avoid hyphenation entirely, serving up an ugly hodgepodge of justified and ragged-right text. C'mon guys, this is old stuff...<p>Any open hardware with e-ink?
When I wanted to investigate fractals using Scheme, I had the Scheme program spit out PostScript output, then ran it through gs to look at the results.<p>PostScript is really tractable as a language to work directly in. Basic line-drawing stuff is almost as simple as the Logo I played with as a kid.
I'm not sure I'd ever try it myself — for one thing, PostScript would only be useful for preparing documents destined for print, not HTML — but if I ever did need such a thing, I'd be interested to try it out.
I like hand-coding PostScript. Been doing it since the early 90's. It doesn't need to be a mess and can be beautifully concise and clean. It does have some odd ideas for the beginner (the page always starts at the bottom left coordinate and goes up, not down) but that's not hard.<p>Its a very cool language -- Forth derived.
Nice. FWIW, We emit "direct" postscript for most of our generated warehouse documents like packing slips, gift cards, snail-mail gift certificates, invoices, etc.