Lectures on PostScript (Bill Casselman)

• References
  • Course manual
  • Adobe's PostScript reference manual (a .pdf file of about 7Mb, 3rd edition, level 3 PostScript)
• Lectures
  • Monday's lecture
  • Tuesday's lecture
  • Wednesday's lecture
  • Thursday's lecture
  • Friday's lecture
  • A A sample .HTML page (for student projects)
• Exercises
  • Monday's exercises (.pdf)
  • Monday's solutions
    • Exercise 1 (src)
    • Exercise 1
    • Exercise 2 (src)
    • Exercise 2
    • Exercise 3 (src)
    • Exercise 3
    • Exercise 4 (src)
    • Exercise 4
    • Exercise 5 (src)
    • Exercise 5
    • Exercise 6 (src)
    • Exercise 6
    • Exercise 7 (src)
    • Exercise 7
  • Tuesday's exercises (.pdf)
  • Tuesday's solutions
    • Exercise 1 (src)
    • Exercise 1
    • Exercise 2 (src)
    • Exercise 2. This is potentially a very difficult problem, since the size of the grid has to depend on a and b. And you don't want to draw a huge number of disks. The best solution comes from the reduction theory of Karl Friedrich Gauss! But this solution ignores the difficulties.
    • Exercise 3 (src)
    • Exercise 3. This constructs the Bézier curves according to the formula for parametrized curves. This assigns the control points with a parameter of 3.14159 .../6 = 0.5236. The one used by Java2D is about 0.552, and looks more like a circle.
    • Exercise 4 should be clear from the examples in the lecture.
    • Exercise 5 (src)
    • Exercise 5
    • No solution provided for Exercise 6.
  • Wednesday's exercises (.pdf)
  • Wednesday's solutions
    • Exercise 1 (src)
    • Exercise 1
    • Exercise 1bis (src). This is done with straight line segment as a step towards the final solution. The basic rule of happy programming is to solve problems in small steps.
    • Exercise 1bis
    • No solution provided for Exercise 2
  • Thursday's exercises (.pdf)
  • Thursday's solutions
    • Exercise 1. The simplest way to construct a regular tetrahedron is by using four corners of a cube. Then scale it. Another way is to deduce from an argument about centres of gravity that if the top is (0,0,1) then the base is at z=-1/3. Again, it will need scaling to get edges of length 1.
    • Place an imaginary plane between the two tetrahedra. Draw first the one on the opposite side of this plane from the (inverse-transformed or virtual eye). This is the first use of the technique of binary space partitioning.