Macs and me

I am profoundly saddened since I woke up at 4:00am in the morning, and saw the news headline about the passing of Steve Jobs. I have seen this coming for a long time, as my father died in a very similar way back 1993 with only 52. Looking at the thin appearance of Jobs in the last month or even years I constantly get reminded of him. Basically the same story of suffering, loss of weight, liver transplant (in vain), death. RIP, Dad, RIP, Steve.

I am writing this on a rusty vintage 2000 PowerBook G4 Titanium, I bought on eBay last year, because the video of my own 2001 TiBook went black. By today's web standards completely inadequate, it serves me well for news reading, terminal logins, etc. My son Pedro got his MacBook Pro 15'' delivered just today. An awesome piece of technology.

My father bought the first Mac in 1986, just after opening his practice as a neurologist. This was two years after cutting all strings in Hungary and fleeing to Germany in a pretty bold move. Must have been a moment of total self-overestimation when I promised to my dad "if you buy that Mac Plus I'll write you the best software for it for your doctor's office". A crazy time began. At day the Mac was used to keep patient's data with a DTP program "RagTime", at 5pm I hauled the Mac home (in a big black bag) and started writing the program. Sometimes deep into the night. I used Turbo Pascal (and later MPW) after figuring out that the Lisp environment I preferred simply did not cut it due to insufficient support of the Toolbox. In the morning my father carried the Mac back and powered it up.

Less than year later the program was ready for productive work. A Mac SE joined the party and we had a networked doctor's application with a really neat windowed user interface, that would put even today's programs to shame in this regard.

There was even a time when we fancied marketing this product, but my university duties and the early death of my father simply negated all plans to this end.

When I had my diploma in my hands I picked up the phone and called the guy who sold us the Mac Plus and a copy of "Inside Macintosh" back in '86. In the meantime he founded a pretty successful company around a networked admin solution called 'netOctopus' which was his baby. We occasionally met at Apple developer events and I new that he was a pretty damn good coder. He hired me and I was earning money by programming Macs!

So yes, I love Macs and there is no reason that this will change in the foreseeable future.

I kept telling to myself, should Jobs die one day, I'll put that Mac Plus (now in my basement and still functional) up for sale at eBay. My thought today: "screw it – too many fond memories attached".

Lion's Share

I am sick. Five days already, and counting. My brain feels like Sauerkraut and thinking is hard. But my dysregulated sleep cycle lets me ponder all kinds of idle things.

One of them is the upcoming "Back to Mac" announcements on Wednesday 11/9. It seems pretty sure that Mac OS X 10.7 (or 11.0 possibly) will be introduced under the 'Lion' code name. This is pretty exciting as nothing really revolutionary happened in the Mac world since 'Leopard'.

Many people are speculating what the foundations will be. My bet is a fully-LLVM compiled system: good-bye GCC, we had a nice time together. The majority of the LLVM team is virtually absent from the IRC channel and the mailing lists, they must be working on something big...

That is, ironing out the latest bugs so that nothing embarrassing can happen while Steve is on stage. But clang v2.8 already compiles e.g. the FreeBSD kernel and userland with pretty good quality, so this cannot be the entire reason. The (already filled-in) job posting for a "revolutionary new feature in the very foundations of Mac OS X" is probably LLVM-related. Modern GPUs have hundreds of very potent processors that excel at floating-point computations. To use them effectively one needs a flexible compiler that can specialize snippets of code to run on each with optimal throughput. OpenCL attempts this but mostly in the graphical domain, and it sources from a C-like language. What we have in this case, however, is not about graphics... I am going on a limb here and suggest that the new feature is about ... conscience! Yeah, a primitive (compared to humans) but effective way of reflection, that is, understanding of its own existence and goals. Also the goals of the user! This will pave the way to new forms of assistance the OS can provide for us to get our jobs done. It has been tried many times, but to cite the job description, "Something that has never been done before and will truly amaze everyone".

My neuronal storm has ceased, I feel limp and tired. Time for another nap. Bye.

Taming PSNormalizer

For distilling a PDF on the Mac I had to unlearn almost everything. Or at least I have to use some more tools, while ignoring others. What I shall write down now is the product of one night of intensive research by googling with lots of trial-and-error.

So, producing the .ps with lout was easy and just like on Solaris. But there is no Distiller in my setup, instead I normally use Preview.app. Double-clicking on the .ps file in the Finder usually is sufficient. Not this time, though, because the Latin Modern fonts were missing, and Preview.app substitutes Courier for them. Clearly a suboptimal solution.
Dropping the .pfb and .afm files into the Fonts folder (personal or system Libraries/Fonts) only had the effect of locking up Preview.app with every job. This is what other people also report in support forums. I removed the font files again.
The solution must be including the font into the .ps file. There is a small utility called includeres in the MacPorts psutils package. Unfortunately the script did not run out of the box, I had to edit it to invoke perl by full pathname (#!/opt/local/bin/perl). But then I had to symlink LMRoman9-Regular to lmr9.pfb for this approach to work. Opening the resultant pimped up .ps file with Preview.app resulted in the well-known hangup. Hmmm, .pfb is apparently not palatable for Preview.app.

So I began digging deeper. It looked like there is a PSNormalizer entry in the /tmp/ directory. It seems to be the bastard child of Distiller, licensed to Apple from Adobe. I figured it also has a command-line interface pstopdf too. PSNormalizer seems to be a private system framework, with a certain directory structure. After finding it on my HD, I could examine its contents. There is a Resource/ directory with fonts/ in it. I dropped my .pfb there. Hangup. At least I knew now that I am on the right path. PSNormalizer looks for fonts in Resource/fonts/ and after that in ~/Library/Fonts and the global /Library/Fonts.
Resource/fonts/ has two files in it, one of them being Courier. Looking at the dump, it seemed very close to .pfb files, but all ascii. It must be a .pfa file! From here it was easier to proceed:

1. grabbing a pfb2pfa converter from CTAN (part of ps2mf)
2. with a small script converting all .pfbs to .pfas
3. dropping these into Resource/fonts/
4. redistilling

This time it worked! But it is tiresome to invoke Preview.app all the time using the mouse, so I am using pstopdf now, which is a perfect substitute for Distiller. Also I have my .pfas in /Library/Fonts/, so everybody on that Mac has access to them.

Nevertheless I could relax at this point, and do some experimentation. Here are some things I stumbled upon:

• PSNormalizer/Startup/ can contain arbitrary .ps files that are run before each distillation job starts. This can be useful for customization.
• Resource/startupNORM.ps contains some interesting code and can probably also be modified.
• Using includeres with .pfa fonts also works.
• The PSRESOURCEPATH environment variable does not seem to affect pstopdf.
• pstopdf has two brothers, pstopnm and pstops. I still have to find out what they are good for.
• And there is more: ps2epsi and many other commands starting with "ps" come from the Ghostscript MacPorts package.

All in all, I feel much better about the PDF-workflow on the Mac now :-)

Addendum (2017)
there is an utility (from Ghostscript?) for converting pfb->pfa:

cd /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PSNormalizer.framework/Resources/fonts

foreach i (`find /opt/local/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts -name "*.pfb"`)

sudo pfbtopfa $i 

end