Functional PostScript Tutorial Functional PostScript Tutorial

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This documentation is an introduction to Functional PostScript in tutorial style. This document does not cover all the topics and features available in FPS. My goal is to give you a flavor of what you can do with FPS and show you where to look further for more info. Each section is a brief overview of a concept with examples, and at the end of each section there is a list of related procedures that you can look up later in the Procedure Reference Manual.

What you need:

  1. know the basics of the Lisp or Scheme language
  2. scsh (Scheme Shell)
  3. PostScript/GhostScript viewer, or a PostScript printer.

Copyright (C) 1996 by Wandy Sae-Tan and Olin Shivers

The Idea

Idea 1: PostScript is a powerful industry standard, but the language is very difficult for the homo sapien brains; we don't think in terms of "stacks" like our HP calculators do. We want something that is easy to use without sacrificing the quality and portability of PostScript.

Idea 2: assemble small simple objects to make a big complex one. To draw a face, we draw the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, and the head, and assemble them together. This whole-from-parts idea is not novel, but it is good: we can easily organize hierarchies structures for our pictures and we can reuse simple objects that we created multiple times.


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