[sdiy] Front panel labeling

[Don Tillman]

   From: "Theo" <t.hogers at home.nl>
   Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 22:53:35 +0100

   A plain ASCII text editor.
   And a lot of knowledge about the Postscript language.
   Postscript is a programming language, although it uses some
   "unreadable" characters as it is not supposed to be "processed" by
   humans. 

Nah...  PostScript uses the standard ascii character set; there are no
unreadable characters, and the cookbook give you a large number of
human-readable examples.  The output of many programs that use
PostScript might be somewhat unreadable, but that's because they
really are destined for a printer.

   You may even include random factors, do calculations or use
   recursive routines.

You can even write FFT's in PostScript.  (!!!)   This is actually
useful... if you want to make an illustration, say a plot or
something, that uses a specific mathematical function, you can
implement the actual function.

It's also useful because you can completely parameterize your
drawings.  Let's say you've gone to the trouble of laying out your
front panel for a specific size of knob, and then later you decide
that a smaller knob is more appropriate.  If this value is a parameter
you just set the new knob diamater and the text above the knob will be
moved to a new position.

A really cool example is Jamie Zawinski's audio tape label program.
It's a PostScript program that prints up custom J-Cards for audio
cassettes, but since it's parameterized it also works for slim
cassette boxes, or DAT tapes, VHS video tapes or whatever.  

Check it out here:
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/marginal.html

  -- Don

-- 
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California, USA
don at till.com
http://www.till.com