Working with PostScript and PDF

PostScript is a standard page description language. it effectively manages scalilng of fonts and vector graphics to provide quality printouts.

The format itself is a language that Adobe developed in the early 1980s to enable the transfer of data to printers.

Feature of PostScript are:

  • it can be used on any printer that is PostScript-compatible, i.e., any modern printer.
  • Any program that understands the PostScript specification can print to it.
  • Information about page appearance, etc., is embedded in the page.

Postscript has been, for most part, superseded by the PDF format (Portable Document Format), which produces far smaller files in a compressed format for which support has been integrated into many applications.

However, one still has to deal with postscript documents, often as an intermediate format, on the way to producing file documents.