Mathematical Illustrations: A Manual of Geometry and PostScript | Hacker News Reader

Mathematical Illustrations: A Manual of Geometry and PostScript

personal.math.ubc.ca

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As cool as this is, I think most folks would find the newer tools:

- Asymptote

- Eukleides

- TikZ

- METAPOST

- Nodebox

- OpenSCAD --- see the book series: Geometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make Trigonometry: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123127774-make Calculus: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61739368-make

of greater interest (and for the Pythonistas there is: https://pythonscad.org/ ) --- I'd be interested to know of other tools in this space.

That said, most folks just use Inkscape (though at least it has scripting): https://inkscape.org/~pakin/%E2%98%85simple-inkscape-scripti...

Maybe Graphite will spur interest?

I still think PostScript is good (although I had some ideas about how it could be improved, some of which are: allowing automatic allocation for some things by passing null instead of the object to store into, allowing setting the encoding separately from the font, a resource for environment variables, two-way communication with external programs, alpha transparency, FFI, magic dictionaries, etc).

PostScript can be used with or without graphics; I have used it in both ways, because I think PostScript is not a bad programming language, and has many advantages.

I miss Display PostScript from my NeXT Cube, and really wish that some programming system would bring a bit of that back.

I'd be very interested in a recommendation for a GUI programming toolkit and UI set which focused on/made available vector graphics.

>- OpenSCAD --- see the book >series: Geometry: >https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58059196-make Trigonometry: >https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123127774-make Calculus: >https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61739368-make

Do these books actually reference OpenScad or is OpenScad a tool for experimenting with the ideas in the series?

The idea is to use OpenSCAD to make 3D objects which explore the concepts being taught.

If you want to learn OpenSCAD itself then you want:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41392892-programming-wit...

Haha! I used to do LOTS of work in PostScript. The biggest project was a system which was part Python for the management, but PS for the content of a database publishing engine, motivated by the the need to generate crazily complicated real estate books, back in the day. There was a whole huge template system for different kinds of commercial and residential property and all sorts of different sections, ranges and indices. It was responsible for generating hundreds of multi-hundred page documents per day for dozens of real estate boards across Western Canada. Each publication was about as complicated as a Yellow Pages and generated daily and automatically from ever-changing data. In fact, the underlying database schema could evolve automatically through the update mechanisms in RETS (the Real Estate Transaction System API), though that was on the Python side. The rendering happened using GhostScript out to PDF for printing and electronic distribution to realtors. A stupid amount of detail, but what else is a touch of the 'tsim for anyway?!?

My other PostScript stuff was mostly fun and experimental: some fractal hacks which made printers and typesetters groan and some collaborative knowledge visualization stuff. I got started with PostScript on my NextStation in 1991 and it served me well, being the basis of a whole career of programmatic visualization.

As a language it is lovely, if you're a fan of minimalism -- being stack-happy, like FORTH. It is well worth learning even just to flex the mind, but especially if you need to make complex diagrams and value stable APIs.

METAPOST seems to be similarly stable, and has an interesting programming/math model (DEK keeps it open in window and uses it (or METAFONT which it is based on?) for interactive math).

> touch of the 'tsim

Brush of the dyxlesia as well evidently.

Not at all, just a bit of word play. It's "officially" a meme even! Cheers

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/touch-of-the-tism

Yes, it's spelled 'tism not 'tsim. And dyslexia not dyxlesia. But explaining the word play kinda ruins the joke, heh. Just having fun here, no worries.

Here is the three original Postscript Books. They are the classic way to learn PS.

The Blue Book (Tutorial and Cookbook) https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse

The Red Book (Language Reference) https://archive.org/details/postscriptlangua0000unse_l1h3

The Green Book (Language Design) https://archive.org/details/PSGreenBook

Bill Casselman is an amazing mathematician with a diversity of interests. As this makes clear, he's been embracing computation and computational mathematics "since before it was cool." He also has an interest in mathematical history, and travelled to India to see the oldest-known occurrence of 0 (https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-indi...). I'm sure he has tons of other interests about which I don't know.

Like others[1] I was saddened that Mac's Preview program stopped opening .ps/.eps files with the release of Ventura in late 2022. I never understood exactly why; I guess security issues around the PostScript interpreter. But that made it lot less convenient to hack around in .ps files. Ghostscript's interactive display program(s?) never seemed as convenient as Preview.

Still, this book is awesome and I've been inspired by it for awhile. I used to love whipping up diagrams and simple vector art in .ps/.eps files. In a fit of procrastination in ~2006 I created a minimalist horizontal rule for an IEEE conference submission, and that diamondrule.eps[2] has now become the standard. I would say that EPS is still more convenient than SVG as a format to contain, in one self-contained file, raster graphics with overlaid vector graphics.

[1] https://tidbits.com/2022/10/27/preview-in-ventura-drops-supp...

[2] https://github.com/ieeevgtc/tvcg-journal-latex/blob/main/dia...

See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13701897

What a delight! Thanks for the link.

What are the advantages of PostScript vs Asymptote?

Probably mostly the fact that this was started (according to the website) in 1996 and essentially frozen in 2004, which I believe predates the public announcement of Asymptote.

Does Asymptote get much use these days? I thought it was pretty cool, though a bit hard to wrap my mind around, when I first tried it, but nowadays it seems that attention has moved on to TikZ.

Does Asymptote get much use these days?

Not sure. I use it and it is reguarly updated.

https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/ https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/gallery/2Dgraphs/index.html https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/gallery/3Dgraphs/index.html

> Does Asymptote get much use these days?

Kids who get most of the way through AoPS (typically) end up learning some Asymptote as that is the supported way to draw figures on the AoPS website

A quick search shows a paper on it just a couple of years back:

https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-2/tb137hefferon-asymptote.pdf

I found Asymptote interesting, but I'm trying to wrap my mind around METAPOST (and by extension METAFONT) as an easier thing to implement/use.

Low-level, cool stack manipulation, and it predated Asymptote (2003) by being released in 1984.

Is there a single giant PDF for this?

https://isidore.co/CalibreLibrary/Casselman,%20Bill/Mathemat... (PDF 3.9MB)

Not that I know of, back when I read it I had to stitch the files together.

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