What is Adobe Postscript
Some have asked, What is Adobe Postscript? Postscript is a programming language. It is a printer language. It is a way of encapsulating text, images, in a document, and telling a printer how to display those objects. It is supported by most printers, HP, Toshiba, Ricoh (IBM, Lexmark).
Let’s analyze Adobe’s Marketing fluff description of Postscript
Adobe® PostScript® 3™ is the worldwide printing and imaging standard. Used by print service providers, publishers, corporations, and government agencies around the globe, Adobe PostScript 3 gives you the power to print visually rich documents reliably. Adobe PostScript 3 printing technology is licensed to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for building high-performance printing systems and print workflow solutions. As a scalable architecture, it can be easily integrated into a wide range of devices and technologies while maintaining the high quality and performance you expect from Adobe.
worldwide printing and imaging standard, what they really mean, is it has become a de facto standard. It is not the only printer language. And many other languages are still used. Each has its good qualities. By Adobe’s notion, PCL is a standard. IPDS is a standard. Epson FX-80 is a standard. TIFF is a standard.
Postscript is used by print service providers, publishers, corporations, and government agencies. Yes it is used, but it isn’t perfect. If it were perfect Adobe wouldn’t have refined it with there introduction of PDF years back.
Postscript technology is licensed to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Adobe does license it, there are also many open source tools, such as Ghostscript that do not require an agreement with Adobe.
So there you have it. What is Postscript? It is a printer language used by many different manufactures to transmit documents to a printer and have the documents print the same regardless of printer. It is used for document publishing, and is a key part of many Adobe products.
Tags: adobe, printer languages