Ghostscript
In order to save trees, we are not going to send our experimentations to an actual printer. Instead we are going to use a PostScript interpreter.
Specifically, we are going to use Ghostscript.
Ghostscript is a
an interpreter for the PostScript® language and PDF files. Ghostscript consists of a PostScript interpreter layer and a graphics library.
Installation
Obtaining Ghostscript depends on your platform.
Windows
The installation page has binaries for Windows.
Mac
There is a homebrew recipe that can be used to install Ghostscript.
homebrew install ghostscript
Linux
It is likely that Ghostscript is already installed, or that you can install it via a package manager. Otherwise the installation page has binaries for Linux as well.
Verification
Once installed you can verify that Ghostscript works as intended by starting the program. There are various aliases notably ghostscript or the shorter gs should open a blank window and show the following prompt in the terminal
GPL Ghostscript 9.50 (2019-10-15)
Copyright (C) 2019 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
This software is supplied under the GNU AGPLv3 and comes with NO WARRANTY:
see the file COPYING for details.
GS>
This can be used as a Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL). See the Hello, World on how to use that.
Alternative
Ghostscript is a low-level tool that allows you to inspect PostScript programs and how they are interpreted. But often you will want to open a high level viewer.
Again, installing a PostScript viewer is platform dependent. Below we will provide some suggestions per platform
Windows
psviewer seems a capable PostScript viewer on Windows
Mac
The default Preview.app has the capability to show PostScript files
Linux
The utility gv, which stands for ghostview and can be installed via a package manager, is a clunky, but good viewer. It has the option to watch the file you are developing for changes and update the display when changes occur.
In case of emergency
If all the above fails, we have created a utility that will render your PostScript on the web: