postscript Getting started with postscript General Description of PostScript
Example
PostScript is a Turing-complete general programming language, designed and developed by Adobe Systems. Many of the ideas which blossomed in PostScript had been cultivated in projects for Xerox and Evans & Sutherland.
Its main real-world application historically is as a page description language, or in its single-page EPS form a vector-graphics image-description language. It is dynamically-typed, dynamically-scoped, and stack-based which leads to a mostly Reverse Polish syntax.
There are three major releases of PostScript.
- PostScript Level 1 — this was released to the market in 1984 as the resident operating system of the Apple LaserWriter laser printer, inaugurating the Desktop Publishing Era.
- PostScript Level 2 — released in 1991, this contained several important improvements to Level 1, including support for image decompression, in-RIP separation, auto-growing dictionaries, garbage collection, Named Resources, binary encodings of the PostScript program stream itself.
- PostScript 3 — the latest and perhaps most widely adopted version was released in 1997. It too contains several import improvements over Level 2 such as Smooth Shading. The term “level” has been dropped.
Though PostScript is typically used as a page description language -- and therefore is implemented inside many printers to generate raster images -- it can also be used for other purposes. As a quick reverse-polish calculator with more memorable operator names than bc. As an output format generated by another program (usually in some other language).
Though PostScript file are typically 7-bit-clean ASCII, there exist several kinds of binary encoding described in the level 2 standard. And being programmable, a program may implement its own arbitrarily-complex encoding scheme for itself. There is an International Obfuscated Postscript Competition, somewhat less active than the C one.
Online References
-
Index Pages of Adobe Documentation:
https://www.adobe.com/products/postscript/resources.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/postscript.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/font.html -
PostScript Language Reference Manual, 3ed - The PostScript 3 standard. (7.41MB pdf)
(Supplement, Errata) -
PostScript Language Reference Manual, 2ed - The PostScript Level 2 standard. (includes Display PostScript documentation.) (3.29MB pdf)
-
Postscript Tutorial and Cookbook - The blue book. (847KB pdf)
-
Postscript Language Program Design - The green book. (911KB pdf)
-
Thinking in Postscript - By the author of the green book and the blue-book's tutorial. (826KB pdf)
-
PostScript Language Document Structuring Conventions Specification 3.0 (521KB pdf)
-
Adobe Type 1 Font Format (444KB pdf)
-
Encapsulated PostScript File Format Specification 3.0 (185KB pdf)
-
PostScript Printer Description File Format Specification 4.3 (186KB pdf) (Update)
-
Troubleshoot PostScript errors - Debugging tips. (158KB html)
-
Acumen Journal - Archive of Postscript and PDF programming articles. (html directory of zipped pdfs)
-
Mathematical Illustrations: A Manual of Geometry and Postscript - by Bill Casselman. (html directory of pdf chapters and code downloads)
-
Thread with many sorting algorithm implementations (usenet archive)
-
Don Lancaster's Guru Pages
-
Anastigmatix's Direct use of the Postscript Language
-
Open-source step-wise Debugger for Postscript Code
FAQs
Books
-
Postscript Language Reference Manual, 1ed, 1985. Recommended for its small size, and easy operator index from the summary pages (missing from later editions).
-
Real World Postscript. Chapters by various authors on various topics, including excellent coverage of halftoning.
