Tag: postscript

Self-similar petals

Self-similar petals

Original drawn in hand-coded PostScript from a path worked out using InkScape. Translating from InkScape’s SVG paths to PostScript is slightly annoying: PS uses Cartesian conventions, while SVG inverts the Y-axis. At least the SVG path commands map well to PostScript: m → moveto, c → curveto, Z → closepath, S → stroke.

There’s no magic to this figure. Each row of petals is half the length of the row outside it. As there are 6 petals arranged in a circle, each petal is 60° of arc. To make the half-step between rows, the petals are rotated 30°, so the rows have to be scaled by sin 30°, or ½.

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The Cuisenaire-Gattegno Log Cabin

Rods! Or more specifically, Cuisenaire® Rods! Staples of my childhood arithmetic education: coloured wooden rods (now plastic, which will save them from the mouldy fate that befell some sets at Mearns Primary School), 1 × 1 × 1–10 centimetres long. Use them for counting, number lines, don’t-do-that renditions of Sun Arise, but absolutely never for flinging at tiny classmates.

Since it may actually have been Mrs. Cuisenaire who came up with the concept of rods, I drew a log cabin quilt section in virtual rods. The Gattegno in the title refers to Caleb Gattegno, the mid-century educator who popularized Cuisenaire’s work.

Should you too feel the need to have a virtual set of rods, here are some files you can play with in Inkscape (or any other SVG-aware editor):

rods.svg — A palette of horizontal and vertical rods
rods.svg — A palette of horizontal and vertical rods
rods-quilt.svg - source for the header image
rods-quilt.svg – source for the header image

The colours might be a bit off reality, but they’re near enough. I found it helpful to set a grid snap in Inkscape to 1 cm so that you could get the rods to align easily. If you want to get really nerdy, here’s the PostScript source I used to create the rods: rods.ps. I think I finally got the hang of basic arrays in PostScript …

Creating this was in no way a means of me displacing getting round to doing my taxes this year, nosirree.

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pretty-printing Arduino sketches

I don’t often need it, but the code printing facility in the Arduino IDE is very weak. It has some colour highlighting, but no page numbering, no line numbering, and no headers at all.

a2ps will sort you right out here. Years back, it was a simple text to PostScript filter, but now it has many wonderful filters for pretty-printing code. The Wiring/Arduino language is basically C++, and a2ps knows how to deal with that. So, to create a PostScript file with a nice version of the the most basic Blink sketch:

a2ps --pro=color -C -1 -M letter -g --pretty-print='c++' -o ~/Desktop/Blink.ps Blink.ino

If you’re somewhere that uses sensible paper sizes (in other words, not North America), you probably don’t want the -M letter option. a2ps is supposed to have a PDF print option (-P pdf), but it doesn’t work on my installation, so I just splat the output through ps2pdf. You can’t use the -P «printer» option combined with the -o «file» option, but cups-pdf is your friend if you need to print to a PDF. The results are linked below:

Not bad, eh?

(Update: think I must have written this post on a Mac with a case-insensitive filesystem. Using the --pretty-print='C++' option I had before failed on Linux.)

still rather more proud of this code than I should be

Years ago, I wrote this tiny subroutine in PostScript:

/box { % draw a box given lower left and upper right corner coordinates
  2 copy moveto
  3 index exch lineto
  3 -1 roll 2 index lineto
  exch lineto
  closepath
} def

All it does is define a rectangular path given by four numbers. So to draw a box from (0,0) to (100,50), you’d say

0 0 100 50 box
stroke

This code still pleases me because:

  • it accepts arguments in a sensible order
  • it uses no local variables, relying purely on the stack
  • no spare values have to be popped from the stack at any time.

Lady Goosepelt Rides Again!

Lady Goosepelt, from What a Life!

In case anyone wants them, the 600 dpi page images of What a Life! are stored in this PDF: what_a_life.pdf (16MB). If you merely wish to browse, all the images from the book are here.

I got a bit carried away with doing this. Instead of just smacking together all the 360 dpi TIFFs I scanned seven years ago, I had to scan a new set at a higher resolution, then crop them, then fix the page numbers, add chapter marks, and make the table of contents a set of live links.

I’ve got out of the way of thinking in PostScript, so I spent some time looking for tools that would do things graphically. Bah! These things’d cost a fortune, so armed only with netpbm, libtiff, ghostscript, the pdfmark reference, Aquamacs, awk to add content based on the DSC, and gimp to work out the link zones on the contents page, I made it all go. Even I’m impressed.

One thing that didn’t impress me, though:

aquamacs file size warning

I used to edit multi-gigabyte files with emacs on Suns. They never used to complain like this. They just loaded (admittedly fairly slowly) and let me do my thing. Real emacs don’t give warning messages.

All the printers I’ve ever owned …

bird you can see: hp print test

  • An ancient (even in 1985) Centronics serial dot-matrix printer that we never got working with the CPC464. The print head was driven along a rack, and when it hit the right margin, an idler gear was wedged in place, forcing the carriage to return. Crude, noisy but effective.
  • Amstrad DMP-2000. Plasticky but remarkably good 9-pin printer. Had an open-loop ribbon that we used to re-ink with thick oily endorsing ink until the ribbons wore through.
  • NEC Pinwriter P20. A potentially lovely 24-pin printer ruined by a design flaw. Print head pins would get caught in the ribbon, and snap off. It didn’t help that the dealer that sold it to me wouldn’t refund my money, and required gentle persuasion from a lawyer to do so.
  • Kodak-Diconix 300 inkjet printer. I got this to review for Amiga Computing, and the dealer never wanted it back. It used HP ThinkJet print gear which used tiny cartridges that sucked ink like no tomorrow; you could hear the droplets hit the page.
  • HP DeskJet 500. I got this for my MSc thesis. Approximately the shape of Torness nuclear power station (and only slightly smaller), last I heard it was still running.
  • Canon BJ 200. A little mono inkjet printer that ran to 360dpi, or 720 if you had all the time in the world and an unlimited ink budget.
  • Epson Stylus Colour. My first colour printer. It definitely couldn’t print photos very well.
  • HP LaserJet II. Big, heavy, slow, and crackling with ozone, this was retired from Glasgow University. Made the lights dim when it started to print. Came with a clone PostScript cartridge that turned it into the world’s second-slowest PS printer. We did all our Canadian visa paperwork on it.
  • Epson Stylus C80. This one could print photos tolerably well, but the cartridges dried out quickly, runing the quality and making it expensive to run.
  • Okidata OL-410e PS. The world’s slowest PostScript printer. Sold by someone on tortech who should’ve known better (and bought by someone who also should’ve known better), this printer jams on every sheet fed into it due to a damaged paper path. Unusually, it uses an LED imaging system instead of laser xerography, and has a weird open-hopper toner system that makes transporting a part-used print cartridge a hazard.
  • HP LaserJet 4M Plus. With its duplexer and extra paper tray it’s huge and heavy, but it still produces crisp pages after nearly 1,000,000 page impressions. I actually have two of these; one was bought for $99 refurbished, and the other (which doesn’t print nearly so well) was got on eBay for $45, including duplexer and 500-sheet tray. Combining the two (and judiciously adding a bunch of RAM) has given me a monster network printer which lets you know it’s running by dimming the lights from here to Etobicoke.
  • IBM Wheelwriter typewriter/ daisywheel printer. I’ve only ever produced a couple of pages on this, but this is the ultimate letter-quality printer. It also sounds like someone slowly machine-gunning the neighbourhood, so mostly lives under wraps.
  • HP PhotoSmart C5180. It’s a network photo printer/scanner that I bought yesterday. Really does print indistinguishably from photos, and prints direct from memory cards. When first installed, makes an amusing array of howls, boinks, squeals, beeps and sproings as it primes the print heads.

Geeky PostScript Stuff

These scripts can be ignored if you’re not likely to be working with PostScript files. I wrote/modified these ages ago, and hope someone can use them.

Download epstotiff – convert an Encapsulated PostScript figure to just about any raster format.

Download bbox – calculate the BoundingBox of a page. Should probably be combined with epstotiff.

Download joinps – concatenate a number of PostScript documents.

You’ll pretty much need a Unix box with ghostscript to make these work.