🚀 go-pugleaf

At the risk of clarifying what many people have already made obvious (and 
adding a little more)...

Interpress (note no capital P!) was the "precursor" to PostScript in the 
sense that it was developed in part by some of the principals at Adobe 
while they were at Xerox.  They shared an imaging model but had different 
design goals -- think of them as branches from a common ancestor rather 
than stages in a product evolution.  Both Interpress and PostScript (note 
the capital S!) derive from JaM (note the small a!), which was implemented 
by John Warnock and Martin Newell at PARC (which derived from the Design 
System, implemented by Warnock at Evans and Sutherland).

Woody's ice cream cone was indeed an Interpress master.  As Kok Chen and 
others have mentioned, imPRESS was a printer control language from Imagen, 
not a page or document description language.  But, while on the subject, 
perhaps the original requestor should look at PCL5?

In article <1991May25.125928.11342@dircon.co.uk> uad1077@dircon.co.uk (Ian 
Kemmish) writes:
> I actually have some Interpress documentation sitting behind my
> sofa, in my computer antiques collection.  It embodied some of the
> key ideas of PS, but some of the aims were (I think) different.
> All the transformation stuff was there.  Fonts were represented
> as vectors of small procedure.  The path and stroke construction
> operators were sort-of familiar, but they didn't cope with
> curved lines.  Color was handled differently, and sort-of allowed
> different colour spaces, but not in the same way as Level 2 PS.
> It did support the stencil-paint metaphor, plus sampled images.

Interpress 3.0 has direct support for Bezier curves.  Fonts, color spaces, 
compression operators, etc. are actually defined as part of the 
"environment" which an Interpress printer could access -- they are not 
specified as part of the language the way that PostScript has font 
dictionaries, color space dictionaries, etc.  Interpress supported color 
sampled images before PostScript, and more generally!

> Oh, yes, and the language encoing was stright bytecodes.  There was
> no ASCII syntax as PS has (other than that used to explain programs
> in the manual - a bit like Adobe's Type 1 encoding).

There are tools available to the teeming number of Interpress developers 
to "assemble" and "disassemble" the manual syntax into byte codes.  Note 
that PostScript Level 2 also features a binary encoding for compactness 
and performance!

The significant difference between IP and PS is that Interpress *requires* 
page independence and is structured to do so, whereas PostScript only 
recommends it and provides structuring comments instead.  PostScript has 
more standard programming language constructs like loop operators.  (This 
stems from the different design goals -- Interpress was intended to be 
generated by a machine and printed on high-speed printers; PostScript was 
first implemented at the low-end and is designed to be programmable by 
humans as well as drivers.)

In article <1991May24.181423.1102@engage.pko.dec.com> 
davis@3d.enet.dec.com (Peter Davis) writes:
> 
> I believe Apple is trying to promote their QuickDraw graphics interface 
to a
> PDL, with the addition of the TrueType technology from MicroSoft.

QuickDraw is a more-or-less resolution-dependent imaging model with a 
procedural interface.  I haven't heard that we're promoting it as a PDL 
(but no one would tell me anyway...)  The TrueType font technology was 
developed at Apple and is licensed to Microsoft (note no capital S!) 
rather than vice versa.

Disclaimer:  Trust me...

--Kevin Andresen [kevina@apple.com]
"You took the wind right out of my sails/It must be luff/It must be luff"