Name: Interpress, the source book
ISBN: 9780134755915

What Hacker News says

dredmorbiusAug 2023

NB: Interpress, The Source Book (Harrington & Buckley) is now available at the Internet Archive:

<https://archive.org/details/interpresssource0000harr/page/2/...>

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DonHopkinsMay 2019

Thanks for writing and updating such a great well researched article!

Funnily enough, the first sentence of the Wikipedia page about Interpress literally says: "Interpress is a page description language developed at Xerox PARC, based on the Forth programming language [1] and an earlier graphics language called JaM."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpress

The [1] reference is to: Harrington, Steven; Buckley, Robert R. (1988). Interpress, the Source Book. Brady Book. p. 18. ISBN 0-13-475591-X.

Unfortunately, I can't find a copy of it online (wouldn't it be deliciously ironic to find a PDF rendering of the Interpress Source Book? ;), so I can't check if the citation literally says Interpress was based on Forth, but I've asked Brian Reid if he had a copy or knew a better citation. I'll update the Wikipedia page if I get any more information.

I really love Brian's first-hand account of the origins of PostScript that he posted to laser-lovers!

If the Helvetica font can have a movie all about it, I think the story of PostScript deserves a whole miniseries! "showpage: the PostScript Documentary"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkoX0pEwSCw

Brian Reid is also known for Scribe, the Usenet Cookbook, and is well respected enough in computer security circles that Kevin Mitnick impersonated him on the phone to gain people's trust! ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist...

Brian's brother Glenn Reid was also very active in the PostScript world, he worked for Adobe (Illustrator), Apple (iMovie) and Fractal Design (Painter, Dabbler, Poser), and NeXT (Interpersonal Computing).

Around 1990, Glenn Reid independently designed and developed a delightfully original "Font Appreciation" app for NeXT called TouchType, which decades later only recently somehow found its way into Illustrator. Adobe even CALLED it the "Touch Type Tool", but didn't give him any credit or royalty. The only difference in Adobe's version of TouchType is that there's a space between "Touch" and "Type" (which TouchType made really easy to do), and that it came decades later!

Illustrator tutorial: Using the Touch Type tool | lynda.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUkE3XLw_EA

SUMMARY OF BaNG MEETING #4, July 18, 1990: https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1990/_CS...

TOUCHTYPE Glenn Reid, Independent NeXT Developer

The next talk was given by Glenn Reid, who previously worked at both NeXT and Adobe. He demonstrated the use of his TouchType application, which should prove to be an enormous boon to people with serious typesetting needs.

TouchType is unlike any other text-manipulation program to date. It takes the traditional "draw program" metaphor used by programs like TopDraw and Adobe Illustrator and extends it to encompass selective editing of individual characters of a text object. To TouchType, text objects are not grouped as sequences of characters, but as individually movable letters. For instance, the "a" in "BaNG" can be moved independently of the rest of the word, yet TouchType still remembers that the "a" is associated with the other three letters.

Perhaps the best feature of this program is the ability to do very accurate and precise kerning (the ability to place characters closer together to create a more natural effect). TouchType supports intelligent automatic kerning and very intuitive, manual kerning done with a horizontal slider or by direct character manipulation. It also incorporates useful features such as sliders to change font sizes, character leading, and character widths, and an option which returns characters to a single base line.

TouchType, only six weeks in development, should be available in early August, with a tentative price of $249. BaNG members were given the opportunity to purchase the software for $150.

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