On 20.06.17 10:25, Jon Elson wrote: > On 06/20/2017 02:50 AM, Erik Christiansen wrote: > > Incidentally, I've found that the Postscript printer language is sorta > > almost like gcode on steroids. Fighting with a GUI drawing package gives > > me chest pains, without producing useful output, so I've just finished > > drawing floorplans, elevations, sections, and started the site plan for > > a new build, with all text input. (800 lines for 8 engineering drawings > > for submission to the local council.) > Don Lancaster wrote a couple books on PostScript. One is "A PostScript > Cookbook". Maybe the other was actually a series of magazine articles, > "PostScript as a programming language". Very useful stuff to know.
The only dead-tree book I have is "Postscript Language reference, third edition." Much good info came from BLUEBOOK.PDF, found on the intertubes. This is my first foray into Postscript, so a steep learning curve. Rewarding though, because each lesson learned amplifies the horsepower applied to the next challenge. Making e.g. a simple double glazed window function, taking length & wall thickness arguments, meant I only ever had to think once how to draw a window. Adding a "flip" allowed the dimension text, also taken from the arguments, to be always the right way up. > I do some mechanical drawings in my PC board design package. Mostly, because > I know it very well. I'm beginning to see why you would. I computed truss length as wall length (computed from wall segments + window lengths) + eave + porch, and used that in the corresponding cross-section. When I changed one of the components in the floorplan, the truss niftily redrew itself to the new dimensions, but left the veranda posts behind - because I'd not used the variables to fix their position. Manual drawing would not have found that error for me. One thing I didn't find in the books was how to set a variable to a computed value - all the examples were just setting it to a constant. A little bit of experimentation revealed that an exch did the trick. (I'm still not clear on precisely what that's doing inside Postscript.) Erik ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
