18 Facts About PostScript

1.

PostScript is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm.

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2.

At about this time they were visited by Steve Jobs, who urged them to adapt PostScript to be used as the language for driving laser printers.

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3.

In March 1985, the Apple LaserWriter was the first printer to ship with PostScript, sparking the desktop publishing revolution in the mid-1980s.

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4.

On high-end printers, PostScript processors remain common, and their use can dramatically reduce the CPU work involved in printing documents, transferring the work of rendering PostScript images from the computer to the printer.

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5.

PostScript 3 came at the end of 1997, and along with many new dictionary-based versions of older operators, introduced better color handling and new filters .

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6.

PostScript 3 was significant in terms of replacing the existing proprietary color electronic prepress systems, then widely used for magazine production, through the introduction of smooth shading operations with up to 4096 shades of grey, as well as DeviceN, a color space that allowed the addition of additional ink colors into composite color pages.

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7.

PostScript made it possible to exploit fully these characteristics by offering a single control language that could be used on any brand of printer.

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8.

PostScript went beyond the typical printer control language and was a complete programming language of its own.

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9.

PostScript is noteworthy for implementing 'on-the fly' rasterization in which everything, even text, is specified in terms of straight lines and cubic Bezier curves, which allows arbitrary scaling, rotating and other transformations.

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10.

PostScript avoided this problem with the inclusion of font hinting, in which additional information is provided in horizontal or vertical bands to help identify the features in each letter that are important for the rasterizer to maintain.

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11.

Some basic, inexpensive laser printers do not support PostScript, instead coming with drivers that simply rasterize the platform's native graphics formats rather than converting them to PostScript first.

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12.

When PostScript support is needed for such a printer, Ghostscript can be used.

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13.

PostScript became commercially successful due to the introduction of the graphical user interface, allowing designers to directly lay out pages for eventual output on laser printers.

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14.

However, PostScript was written with printing in mind, and had numerous features that made it unsuitable for direct use in an interactive display system.

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15.

The difference between the PDF and PostScript is that the PDF lacks the general-purpose programming language framework of the PostScript language.

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16.

PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language, belonging to the concatenative group.

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17.

Typically, PostScript programs are not produced by humans, but by other programs.

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18.

PostScript is an interpreted, stack-based language similar to Forth but with strong dynamic typing, data structures inspired by those found in Lisp, scoped memory and, since language level 2, garbage collection.

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