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PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language and
PostScript
dynamically typed, stack-based programming
language. It is most commonly used in the electronic
publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a
Turing complete programming language, it can be
used for many other purposes as well. PostScript was
created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles
Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from
1982 to 1984. The most recent version, PostScript 3, PostScript 3 logo
was released in 1997. Paradigm Multi-paradigm:
concatenative (stack-based),
procedural
History Designed by John Warnock, Chuck
Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed
The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded
Taft, Bill Paxton
in 1976 by John Gaffney at Evans &
Sutherland,[2][3][4] a computer graphics company. At Developer Adobe Systems
that time, Gaffney and John Warnock were First appeared 1982
developing an interpreter for a large three-
Stable release PostScript 3 / 1997
dimensional graphics database of New York Harbor.
Typing Dynamic, weak
Concurrently, researchers at Xerox PARC had discipline
developed the first laser printer and had recognized Major implementations
the need for a standard means of defining page Adobe PostScript, TrueImage, Ghostscript
images. In 1975–76 Bob Sproull and William
Influenced by
Newman developed the Press format, which was
eventually used in the Xerox Star system to drive Mesa,[1] Interpress, Lisp
laser printers. But Press, a data format rather than a Influenced
language, lacked flexibility, and PARC mounted the PDF
Interpress effort to create a successor.

In 1978, John Gaffney and Martin Newell then at PostScript (file format)
Xerox PARC wrote J & M or JaM[2][5] (for "John and Filename .ps
Martin") which was used for VLSI design and the extension
investigation of type and graphics printing. This Internet application/postscript
media type
work later evolved and expanded into the Interpress
Uniform Type com.adobe.postscript
language.
Identifier (UTI)
Warnock left with Chuck Geschke and founded Magic %!
number
Adobe Systems in December 1982. They, together
Developed by Adobe Systems
with Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton created a
simpler language, similar to Interpress, called Type of printing file format
format
PostScript, which went on the market in 1984.
Extended to Encapsulated PostScript

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Meanwhile, in the spring of 1983, Steve Jobs came to visit Adobe and was dazzled by PostScript's
potential, especially for the new Macintosh computer he was developing at Apple.[6] To John
Sculley's frustration, Jobs licensed the PostScript technology from Adobe by offering a $1.5 million
advance against PostScript royalties, plus $2.5 million in exchange for 20 percent of Adobe
shares.[7] During a series of meetings in 1983, Jobs also repeatedly offered for Apple to buy Adobe
outright, but the founders kept turning him down.[7] In December 1983, the two companies finally
signed off on the PostScript licensing deal, and Adobe had to shift focus immediately from high-
end, high-resolution printing devices to the consumer-oriented Apple LaserWriter laser printer.[8]

At that time, the 300-dpi Canon laser printing engine to be used in LaserWriters was seen as good
enough only for proof printing (i.e., for crude rough drafts of material whose final drafts would be
sent to professional high-resolution devices), but Jobs presented Adobe with the challenge of
making PostScript render high-quality output to such a low-resolution device (which for most
consumers would be their only printing device).[9] In response, Warnock and Brotz solved the so-
called "appearance problem" of making the stem width of letters scale properly so that they look
good at all resolutions.[10] Their breakthrough was so important that Adobe has never patented the
technology, in order to keep its details concealed as a trade secret.[10] Paxton worked on several
other related improvements, such as font hinting.[10] Adobe was also responsible for porting
PostScript to the Canon's Motorola 68000 chip.[10]

Apple and Adobe announced the LaserWriter at Apple's annual stockholder meeting on January
23, 1985.[11] It was the first printer to ship with PostScript, sparking the desktop publishing (DTP)
revolution in the mid-1980s.[12] The original PostScript royalty was five percent of the list price for
each laser printer sold, which was $350 of the original LaserWriter list price of $6,995, and such
royalties provided nearly all of Adobe's income during its early years.[13] (Apple later renegotiated
the contract to pay a licensing fee based on volume of printers shipped.)[13] The combination of
technical merits and widespread availability made PostScript the language of choice for graphical
output for printing applications. An interpreter (sometimes referred to as a RIP for Raster Image
Processor) for the PostScript language was a common component of laser printers during the
1980s and 1990s.

However, the cost of implementation was high; computers output raw PS code that would be
interpreted by the printer into a raster image at the printer's natural resolution. This required
high-performance microprocessors and ample memory. The LaserWriter used a 12 MHz Motorola
68000, making it faster than any of the Macintosh computers to which it was attached.[14] When
the laser printer engines themselves cost over a thousand dollars, the added cost of PS was
marginal. But, as printer mechanisms fell in price, the cost of implementing PS became too great a
fraction of overall printer cost. In addition, with desktop computers becoming more powerful
during the 1990s than their attached printers, it no longer made sense to offload the rasterization
work onto the resource-constrained printer. By 2001, few low-end printer models came with
onboard support for PostScript, largely due to growing competition from much cheaper non-
PostScript inkjet printers, and new software-based methods to render PostScript images on
computers, making them suitable for any printer. PDF, a descendant of PostScript, provides one
such method, and has largely replaced PostScript as the de facto standard for electronic document
distribution.

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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PostScript Level 1
The first version of the PostScript language was released to the market in 1984. The qualifier Level
1 was added when Level 2 was introduced.[15]

PostScript Level 2
PostScript Level 2 was introduced in 1991, and included several improvements: improved speed
and reliability, support for in-Raster Image Processing (RIP) separations, image decompression
(for example, JPEG images could be rendered by a PostScript program), support for composite
fonts, and the form mechanism for caching reusable content.[15]

PostScript 3
PostScript 3 (Adobe dropped the "level" terminology in favor of simple versioning) came at the end
of 1997, and along with many new dictionary-based versions of older operators, introduced better
color handling and new filters (which allow in-program compression/decompression, program
chunking, and advanced error handling).

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 (rather than the 256 available in PostScript Level 2), as
well as DeviceN, a color space that allowed the addition of additional ink colors (called spot colors)
into composite color pages.[15][16]

Use in printing

Before PostScript
Prior to the introduction of Interpress and PostScript, printers were designed to print character
output given the text—typically in ASCII—as input. There were a number of technologies for this
task, but most shared the property that the glyphs were physically difficult to change, as they were
stamped onto typewriter keys, bands of metal, or optical plates.

This changed to some degree with the increasing popularity of dot matrix printers. The characters
on these systems were drawn as a series of dots, as defined by a font table inside the printer. As
they grew in sophistication, dot matrix printers started including several built-in fonts from which
the user could select, and some models allowed users to upload their own custom glyphs into the
printer.

Dot matrix printers also introduced the ability to print raster graphics.[17] The graphics were
interpreted by the computer and sent as a series of dots to the printer using a series of escape
sequences. These printer control languages varied from printer to printer, requiring program
authors to create numerous drivers.

Vector graphics printing was left to special-purpose devices, called plotters. Almost all plotters
shared a common command language, HPGL, but were of limited use for anything other than
printing graphics. In addition, they tended to be expensive and slow, and thus rare.

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PostScript printing
Laser printers combine the best features of both printers and plotters. Like plotters, laser printers
offer high-quality line art, and like dot-matrix printers, they are able to generate pages of text and
raster graphics. Unlike either printers or plotters, a laser printer makes it possible to position high-
quality graphics and text on the same page. PostScript made it possible to fully exploit these
characteristics by offering a single control language that could be used on any brand of printer.

PostScript went beyond the typical printer control language and was a complete programming
language of its own. Many applications can transform a document into a PostScript program, the
execution of which results in the original document. This program can be sent to an interpreter in a
printer, which results in a printed document, or to one inside another application, which will
display the document on-screen. Since the document-program is the same regardless of its
destination, it is called device-independent.

PostScript is noteworthy for implementing on-the-fly rasterization in which everything, even text,
is specified in terms of straight lines and cubic Bézier curves (previously found only in CAD
applications), which allows arbitrary scaling, rotating and other transformations. When the
PostScript program is interpreted, the interpreter converts these instructions into the dots needed
to form the output. For this reason, PostScript interpreters are occasionally called PostScript raster
image processors, or RIPs.

Font handling
Almost as complex as PostScript itself is its handling of fonts. The font system uses the PS graphics
primitives to draw glyphs as curves, which can then be rendered at any resolution. A number of
typographic issues had to be considered with this approach.

One issue is that fonts do not scale linearly at small sizes and features of the glyphs will become
proportionally too large or small and start to look displeasing. 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. The result was significantly better-looking fonts even at low resolution. It had formerly
been believed that hand-tuned bitmap fonts were required for this task.

At the time, the technology for including these hints in fonts was carefully guarded, and the hinted
fonts were compressed and encrypted into what Adobe called a Type 1 Font (also known as
PostScript Type 1 Font, PS1, T1 or Adobe Type 1). Type 1 was effectively a simplification of the PS
system to store outline information only, as opposed to being a complete language (PDF is similar
in this regard). Adobe would then sell licenses to the Type 1 technology to those wanting to add
hints to their own fonts. Those who did not license the technology were left with the Type 3 Font
(also known as PostScript Type 3 Font, PS3 or T3). Type 3 fonts allowed for all the sophistication
of the PostScript language, but without the standardized approach to hinting.

The Type 2 font format was designed to be used with Compact Font Format (CFF) charstrings, and
was implemented to reduce the overall font file size. The CFF/Type2 format later became the basis
for handling PostScript outlines in OpenType fonts.

The CID-keyed font format was also designed, to solve the problems in the OCF/Type 0 fonts, for
addressing the complex Asian-language (CJK) encoding and very large character set issues. The
CID-keyed font format can be used with the Type 1 font format for standard CID-keyed fonts, or
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Type 2 for CID-keyed OpenType fonts.

To compete with Adobe's system, Apple designed their own system, TrueType, around 1991.
Immediately following the announcement of TrueType, Adobe published the specification for the
Type 1 font format. Retail tools such as Altsys Fontographer (acquired by Macromedia in January
1995, owned by FontLab since May 2005) added the ability to create Type 1 fonts. Since then,
many free Type 1 fonts have been released; for instance, the fonts used with the TeX typesetting
system are available in this format.

In the early 1990s, there were several other systems for storing outline-based fonts, developed by
Bitstream and Metafont for instance, but none included a general-purpose printing solution and
they were therefore not widely used.

In the late 1990s, Adobe joined Microsoft in developing OpenType, essentially a functional
superset of the Type 1 and TrueType formats. When printed to a PostScript output device, the
unneeded parts of the OpenType font are omitted, and what is sent to the device by the driver is
the same as it would be for a TrueType or Type 1 font, depending on which kind of outlines were
present in the OpenType font.

Adobe supported Type 1 fonts in its products until January 2023, when it fully removed support in
favor of OpenType fonts.[18]

Other implementations
In the 1980s, Adobe drew most of its revenue from the licensing fees for their implementation of
PostScript for printers, known as a raster image processor or RIP. As a number of new RISC-based
platforms became available in the mid-1980s, some found Adobe's support of the new machines to
be lacking.

This and issues of cost led to third-party implementations of PostScript becoming common,
particularly in low-cost printers (where the licensing fee was the sticking point) or in high-end
typesetting equipment (where the quest for speed demanded support for new platforms faster than
Adobe could provide). At one point, Microsoft licensed to Apple a PostScript-compatible
interpreter it had bought called TrueImage, and Apple licensed to Microsoft its new font format,
TrueType. Apple ended up reaching an accord with Adobe and licensed genuine PostScript for its
printers, but TrueType became the standard outline font technology for both Windows and the
Macintosh.

Today, third-party PostScript-compatible interpreters are widely used in printers and

multifunction peripherals (MFPs). For example, CSR plc's IPS PS3[19] interpreter, formerly known
as PhoenixPage, is standard in many printers and MFPs, including those developed by Hewlett-
Packard and sold under the LaserJet and Color LaserJet lines. Other third-party PostScript
solutions used by print and MFP manufacturers include Jaws[20] and the Harlequin RIP, both by
Global Graphics. A free software version, with several other applications, is Ghostscript. Several
compatible interpreters are listed on the Undocumented Printing Wiki.[21]

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

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a number of commercial PostScript interpreters, such as TeleType Co.'s T-Script or Brother's BR-
Script3.

Use as a display system

PostScript became commercially successful due to the introduction of the graphical user interface
(GUI), allowing designers to directly lay out pages for eventual output on laser printers. However,
the GUIs' own graphics systems were generally much less sophisticated than PostScript; Apple's
QuickDraw, for instance, supported only basic lines and arcs, not the complex B-splines and
advanced region filling options of PostScript. In order to take full advantage of PostScript printing,
applications on the computers had to re-implement those features using the host platform's own
graphics system. This led to numerous issues where the on-screen layout would not exactly match
the printed output, due to differences in the implementation of these features.

As computer power grew, it became possible to host the PS system in the computer rather than the
printer. This led to the natural evolution of PS from a printing system to one that could also be
used as the host's own graphics language. There were numerous advantages to this approach; not
only did it help eliminate the possibility of different output on screen and printer, but it also
provided a powerful graphics system for the computer, and allowed the printers to be "dumb" at a
time when the cost of the laser engines was falling. In a production setting, using PostScript as a
display system meant that the host computer could render low-resolution to the screen, higher
resolution to the printer, or simply send the PS code to a smart printer for offboard printing.

However, PostScript was written with printing in mind, and had numerous features that made it
unsuitable for direct use in an interactive display system. In particular, PS was based on the idea of
collecting up PS commands until the showpage command was seen, at which point all of the
commands read up to that point were interpreted and output. In an interactive system, this was
clearly not appropriate, nor did PS have any sort of interactivity built in; for example, supporting
hit detection for mouse interactivity obviously did not apply when PS was being used on a printer.

When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he pitched Adobe on the idea of using PS as the
display system for his new workstation computers. The result was Display PostScript, or DPS. DPS
added basic functionality to improve performance by changing many string lookups into 32 bit
integers, adding support for direct output with every command, and adding functions to allow the
GUI to inspect the diagram. Additionally, a set of "bindings" was provided to allow PS code to be
called directly from the C programming language. NeXT used these bindings in their NeXTStep
system to provide an object oriented graphics system. Although DPS was written in conjunction
with NeXT, Adobe sold it commercially and it was a common feature of most Unix workstations in
the 1990s.

Sun Microsystems took another approach, creating NeWS. Instead of DPS's concept of allowing PS
to interact with C programs, NeWS instead extended PS into a language suitable for running the
entire GUI of a computer. Sun added a number of new commands for timers, mouse control,
interrupts and other systems needed for interactivity, and added data structures and language
elements to allow it to be completely object oriented internally. A complete GUI, three in fact, were
written in NeWS and provided for a time on their workstations. However, the ongoing efforts to
standardize the X11 system led to its introduction and widespread use on Sun systems, and NeWS
never became widely used.

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Portable Document Format

PDF and PostScript share the same imaging model, and both documents are mutually convertible
to each other. Both documents produce the same result when printed. The difference between PDF
and PostScript is that PDF lacks the general-purpose programming language framework of the
PostScript language. A PDF document is a static data structure made for efficient access and
embeds navigational information suitable for interactive viewing.[22]: 9

The language
PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language, belonging to the concatenative group of
programming languages. It 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. The language syntax uses reverse Polish notation, which
makes the order of operations unambiguous, but reading a program requires some practice,
because one has to keep the layout of the stack in mind. Most operators (what other languages
term functions) take their arguments from the stack, and place their results onto the stack. Literals
(for example, numbers) have the effect of placing a copy of themselves on the stack. Sophisticated
data structures can be built on the array and dictionary types, but cannot be declared to the type
system, which sees them all only as arrays and dictionaries, so any further typing discipline to be
applied to such user-defined "types" is left to the code that implements them.

The character "%" is used to introduce comments in PostScript programs. As a convention, every
PostScript program should start with the characters "%!PS" as an interpreter directive so that all
devices will properly interpret it as PostScript.

PostScript programs are typically divided into two parts, conventionally called the prolog and the
script. The prolog contains procedures and is written by a programmer. The script passes data to
those procedures. The script is often generated automatically, using a programming language other
than PostScript.[23]

"Hello world"
A Hello World program, the customary way to show a small example of a complete program in a
given language, might look like this in PostScript (level 2):

%!PS
/Courier % name the desired font
20 selectfont % choose the size in points and establish
% the font as the current one
72 500 moveto % position the current point at
% coordinates 72, 500 (the origin is at the
% lower-left corner of the page)
(Hello world!) show % paint the text in parentheses
showpage % print all on the page

or if the output device has a console

%!PS
(Hello world!) =

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Units of length
PostScript uses the point as its unit of length. However, unlike some of the other versions of the
point, PostScript uses exactly 72 points to the inch. Thus:

1 25.4 127
1 point = ⁠72 ⁠inch = ⁠ 72 ⁠mm = ⁠360 ⁠mm = 352.777… micrometers

For example, in order to draw a vertical line of 4 cm length, it is sufficient to type:

0 0 moveto
0 113.385827 rlineto stroke

More readably and idiomatically, one might use the following equivalent, which demonstrates a
simple procedure definition and the use of the mathematical operators mul and div:

/cm {72 mul 2.54 div} def % 1 inch = 2.54 cm exactly

0 0 moveto
0 4 cm rlineto stroke

(Technically, most printers have a construction-implied unprintable margin around the physical
borders of the sheet, and the 0 0 coordinates are calibrated to its corner,[22]: section 4.3.1 so you
might have to use a different starting point to actually see something.)

Most implementations of PostScript use single-precision reals[22]: appendix B (24-bit mantissa), so it

is not meaningful to use more than 9 decimal digits to specify a real number, and performing
calculations may produce unacceptable round-off errors.

Software
Software which can be used to render PostScript documents:

Ghostscript
pstoedit
Zathura
Vim

See also
Adobe StandardEncoding (PostScript character set)
Document Structuring Conventions
Encapsulated PostScript
LaTeX
PostScript Printer Description (PPD)
Printer Command Language (PCL)

References
1. Perry, T.S. (May 1988). " 'PostScript' prints anything: a case history". IEEE Spectrum. 25 (5):
42–46. doi:10.1109/6.4550 (https://doi.org/10.1109%2F6.4550). S2CID 33376390 (https://api.s
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emanticscholar.org/CorpusID:33376390).
2. Reilly, Edwin (2003). Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology (https://archi
ve.org/details/milestonesincomp0000reil/page/206). Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 206.
ISBN 9781573565219.
3. Peterson, J.K (Jun 28, 2018). Fiber Optics Illustrated Dictionary. Taylor & Francis Group.
ISBN 9781138455757.
4. Nguyen, Binh (2004). Linux Dictionary (https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=vdZWBQAAQ
BAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP1) (0.16 ed.). Binh Nguyen. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/202
10224140917/https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=vdZWBQAAQBAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP
1) from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 28 September 2019.
5. Biancuzzi, Federico; Warden, Shane (2009). "Chapter 16. PostScript". Masterminds of
Programming. O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN 9780596515171.
6. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 33. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
7. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 34. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
8. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 35. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
9. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 36. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
10. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
11. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 47. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
12. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 48. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
13. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 69. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
14. Pfiffner, Pamela (2003). Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Berkeley: Peachpit
Press. p. 53. ISBN 0-321-11564-3.
15. "Differences Between Adobe PostScript Levels 1, 2, and 3" (https://www.thoughtco.com/differe
nce-adobe-postscript-levels-1074580). ThoughtCo. Retrieved 2025-03-04.
16. "PostScript 3 General Information" (https://archive.today/20250304132704/https://web.archive.
org/web/20030624050921/http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/210f6.htm). Adobe. 2002-
06-04. Archived from the original (https://pdfguru.com/) on 2025-03-04. Retrieved 2025-03-04.
17. "Dot-Matrix Graphics" (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.4.0?topic=capabilities-dot-matrix-gr
aphics). www.ibm.com. Retrieved 2025-03-04.
18. "PostScript Type 1 fonts end of support" (https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-
fonts-end-of-support.html). Adobe. Retrieved 2 March 2024.
19. IPS PS3 (https://archive.today/20120724005159/http://www.csr.com/products/120/ips-ps3),
CSR, archived from the original (http://www.csr.com/products/120/ips-ps3) on 2012-07-24
20. Jaws (https://archive.today/20130124020524/http://www.globalgraphics.com/products/jaws-pdf
-and-postscript-rip-sdk/), Global graphics, archived from the original (http://www.globalgraphics.
com/products/jaws-postscript-interpreter/) on 2013-01-24, retrieved 2012-06-13
21. "Page description languages: Postscript", Formats (https://web.archive.org/web/201711052143
28/http://www.undocprint.org/formats/page_description_languages/postscript), Undocumented
Printing, archived from the original (http://www.undocprint.org/formats/page_description_langu
ages/postscript) (wiki) on 2017-11-05, retrieved 2009-12-15
22. Adobe Systems (1999). PostScript language reference (https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscr
ipt/pdfs/PLRM.pdf) (PDF) (3 ed.). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-37922-8.
OCLC 40543937 (https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/40543937). Archived (https://web.archive.or
g/web/20221024130918/https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf) (PDF) from
the original on 2022-10-24. Retrieved 2022-08-14.
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02/04/2025, 22:37 PostScript - Wikipedia

23. Adobe Systems Inc. PostScript Language Reference Manual , 2nd ed., Appendix G, Document
Structuring Conventions-Version 3.0. Addison Wesley, 1990, p. 611.

Further reading
Adobe Systems Incorporated (February 1999) [1985]. PostScript Language Reference Manual
(https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf) (PDF) (1st printing, 3rd ed.).
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. ISBN 0-201-37922-8. Retrieved 2023-07-14. (NB. This
book (PLR3) together with the Supplement (https://web.archive.org/web/20160305010005/htt
p://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/PS3010and3011.Supplement.pdf) (PDF),
archived from the original (http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/PS3010and3011.
Supplement.pdf) (PDF) on 2016-03-05, retrieved 2006-04-29 is the de facto defining work on
PostScript 3 and is informally called "red book" due to its red cover.)
Adobe Systems Incorporated (1990) [1985]. PostScript Language Reference Manual (2nd ed.).
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. (NB. This edition (PLR2) covers PostScript Level 2 and
also contains a description of Display PostScript, which is no longer discussed in the third
edition.)
Adobe Systems Incorporated (1985). PostScript Language Reference Manual (1st ed.).
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. (NB. This edition (PLR1) covers PostScript Level 1.)
Geschke, Charles (1986) [1985]. Preface. PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (https://
archive.org/details/postscriptlangua00adobrich). By Adobe Systems Incorporated (27th
printing, August 1998, 1st ed.). Addison Wesley Publishing Company. ISBN 0-201-10179-3. 9-
780201-101799. Retrieved 2017-02-27. (NB. This introductory text is informally called "blue
book" due to its blue cover.)
PostScript language program design (https://web.archive.org/web/20110613223722/http://partn
ers.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/sdk/sample/GreenBook.zip). Adobe Systems. Archived
from the original (http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/sdk/sample/GreenBook.zip)
(Zip) on 2011-06-13. (NB. This book is informally called "green book" due to its green cover.)
The Type 1 Font Format (https://web.archive.org/web/20150321034514/http://partners.adobe.c
om/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC.PDF) (PDF), Adobe, archived from the original (http://pa
rtners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC.PDF) (PDF) on 2015-03-21 (NB. This
book is informally called "black book" due to its black cover.)
PostScript vs. PDF (https://web.archive.org/web/20160413212438/https://www.adobe.com/prin
t/features/psvspdf/), Adobe, archived from the original (https://www.adobe.com/print/features/ps
vspdf/) on 2016-04-13 (NB. Official introductory comparison of PS, EPS vs. PDF.)
A First Guide to PostScript (http://www.tailrecursive.org/postscript/postscript.html), Tail
recursive
Casselman, William 'Bill'. Mathematical Illustrations: A Manual of Geometry and PostScript (htt
ps://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BxVCLS4f8Sg5YmY2N
zc5NzMtYWM4MS00ZjRjLTlkNDUtYzhkYjlhYjZjMmY3&hl=en&authkey=CIf-86sC) (PDF).[1] (ht
tp://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manual/)
Reid, Glenn (1990). Thinking in PostScript (https://hint.userweb.mwn.de/compiler/ThinkingInPo
stScript.pdf) (PDF). Colorado, USA: Addison-Wesley. (NB. A thorough tutorial available online
courtesy of the author.)

External links
Computer History Museum: article about early development of PostScript (https://computerhist
ory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printing-press/)

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