ABSTRACT
The programming language POSTSCRIPT1 was released in 1985 by Adobe Systems Incorporated (Adobe, 1985; Adobe, 1990). It is an interpretive programming language with powerful graphics capabilities which was developed mainly to describe and distribute text and graphical shapes on printed pages2. The motivation for the design of POSTSCRIPT was the growing number of different printing devices already discussed in section 3.5 on page 55. In particular, raster output devices such as laser, dot-matrix or ink-jet printers, digital photo-typesetters offered new, sophisticated features such as high-quality typefaces and powerful graphics capabilities. All these devices have in common that they produce images consisting of a rectangular array of picture elements (pixels) and that each of the pixels can be addressed individually. From an application point of view, the use of raster output devices caused major problems, especially as the devices were not only powerful but also incompatible with each other. Thus, one of the design goals for POSTSCRIPT was a standardization of the access to these devices from the application side. An application should be able to create similar-looking output on a variety of printing devices without having to be aware of each printer’s individual characteristics. This could have been realized by a software layer offering various
printer drivers as described on page 55. The drivers would then offer a standardized interface to the application providing a set of primitives for the creation of printed output and generate the device-specific output on the application’s behalf.
