Concept in Definition ABC

At the beginning of the microcomputer era, each company struggled to impose its vision on how to do things in certain aspects. This was the case with printers and, precisely to allow interoperability between systems, the PostScript language was born as the standard for defining pages.

The PostScript page definition language makes it easy to describe pages that contain elements text and graphics for printing on a high-quality printer such as a printer To be.

Historically, and like some other inventions that have ended up being key in the future of the computing and the technology, the PostScript language was born in Xerox PARC, but was exploited and commercially released by Adobe.

Its implementation is none other than a language of programming interpreted that allows describing all the graphic elements that make up a page. When interpreted, it needs the printer have a small processor and an engine to interpret and execute it, which puts the simplest and cheapest printers away from this, leaving PostScript for use in high-editing tasks.

Being a programming language (a file PostScript is still a file of text containing the instructions) interpreted, PostScript is universal, and can be used from platforms hardware/software very different, overcoming the barriers and differences between operating systems.

PostScript not only works with text, but it also works with graphic elements, which it treats with lines, parabolas, or independent pixels.

In this way, we can use not only text on a page, but also graphic elements, such as photographs or drawings.

To accept file information in this Format, printers must be PostScript compliant, something not all do. In the end, what the printer processes is a series of instructions that tell you where to print and where not to print on the sheet, point by point.

One architect of the success of PostScript was Apple, adopting this language for its laser printers, in a era in which it produced this type of devices and, in addition, it maintained a good commercial relationship with Adobe. The success of the PageMaker desktop publishing software also contributed to that success.

The evolution of PostScript has taken place, until the end of the 90s, in the so-called “levels”, while from that point on it continued through “versions”.

Some of the improvements that have been added to PostScript have been the support for fonts other than those of the western alphabets, improvements in the management of the colors, or decompression of images among others.

A large number of programs are capable of exporting the data to a file in PostScript format, so that later, we can process it or print it from another computer system with software different.

A "child" of PostScript that we commonly use in computer systems is the PDF format, which is also description pages, although used at a different level than PostScript.

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