Thinking about DPS some more (was never a mainline thing for me), a few memories surfaced:
You can go back to VMS 7.2 & either run there or more the library to 7.3. But that's just the client side. The DPS interpreter goes in the X server (where the display is); its an 'X extension'. I don't know that there's a current X server that still includes it. It is complicated, ugly and Adobe licensing was involved. There may be a ghostscript based extension that will do it, but you'll have to hunt down a version of the server that supports/can be built with it. It looks like most of the servers dropped DPS support quite a while ago. Alternatively, VMS 7.2 with a local graphics card should work, as DECwindows of that time included the DPS extension in its server. SimH has some graphics card support - but I've never played with it, so I don't know what luck you'll have that way. You're going to have the same issue with Alpha; that's not an escape clause. DPS was a clever idea - basically postscript was the way to get dots formed on a laser printer in a typographically sane fashion. But it was based on the idea that one composed one page at a time. DPS extended the engine so you could have multiple active composing contexts (e.g. one per window!). I think it also allowed for composing partial pages (clipping to the visible portion). The clever part was that this meant that you could have a real WYSIWUG (what you saw is exactly what you got:-) editor. Unlike now, when what I see in a brower never prints the same - because of the layers of different print renderers that are attached to devices. DEC licensed the interpreter from Adobe (as it did for the one in the LPS series printers). I don't think we had a big role in its development; Steve Jobs apparently did when he was in exile at NeXT. I think the complexity and performance killed DPS. Also, applications (e.g. DECwrite) use it via X11, which windoze displaced. It came fairly late in the evolution of X. So there wasn't a huge application base. PDF is the logical successor. This from my recollection of conversations with the hardcopy and workstation groups, and a little archaeology. As I say, this wasn't a mainline issue for me; I touched on it in terms of how to extract text for assistive technologies. So this may not be 100% accurate.
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