Why use postscript

Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Jacci Howard Bear. A graphic designer, writer, and artist who writes about and teaches print and web design. Updated on September 18, Tweet Share Email. Many modern printers include drivers that emulate PostScript. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error.

You can actually experiment with this so that you have firsthand experienced. Draw a box, save the file, and then reopen it in a word processing program. You will see a program, coded in the PostScript language. This program will define the dimensions of a page and draw a box on it. When PostScript first came out, it was only possible to create drawings by manually typing in that language. With the Illustrator program, a designer can draw with graphic tools on the computer while the program is working in the background to automatically write a PostScript program.

However, PostScript differs from these other languages in that it is only meant to perform one task. It is designed to give a very accurate description of what a page looks like. A processor is needed with any programming language to run the code. The RIP will take in code and render it into a set of dots on a page.

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The normal conversion is just to represent the same pdf structures with postscript, which tends to be more verbose. There is also a Latex-specific historical reason why some publishers still request PS versions of documents.

This is relevant primarily in cases in which the publisher just takes an author-prepared document and prints it or puts it online ; for example, many conference proceedings in computer science are produced this way. Previously, the typical toolchain for Latex users involved EPS figures for vector graphics, latex , dvips , and ps2pdf.

With this kind of toolchain it was easy to produce broken PDF files that did not properly embed all fonts that they used. Fixing this was a bit painful if you just have the broken PDF file, but it is usually fairly easy with standard tools if you have the original PS file.

Nowadays everyone uses PDF figures for vector graphs and pdflatex to compile their Latex files. This way anyone can easily produce valid PDF files with all fonts correctly embedded. Publishers are a bit slow to learn that the world has changed, and they are a bit slow to update their tools.

For example, I am aware of a publisher that has a web system that requires that you submit a PS file along with the PDF file, but they do not really need those PS files anymore, so they nowadays recommend that the authors just submit some dummy PS file and name it so that the publisher knows that it should be ignored One reason I recently learned about is that you can generate a printer-specific PS file e. In my world they are two sides of the same coin.

PDF is a display format. Postscript is a printer control language. Both were created by Adobe but for slightly different jobs. PDF is difficult to program against for sorting or adding objects yes I know you can do it in Acrobat, etc. PDF does not have tray logic - all pages must be printed on the same paper stock, not so with Postscript. Also depending on the printer - for almost any printer - all it can really print is either Postscript or PCL.

So I think the question really is what the end user envisions they will have to do with the data - and that they don't want to be responsible for the conversion. I simply use ps for creating my graphics and embed these in plain TeX, which is processed by pdfTeX.

Advantage: portability and full generality of the graphics. The big advantage is that you don't have to be aware of ps. No experience with PStricks on the issue. Disadvantage: In PStricks for example not all orientations of straight lines are possible. Advantage: a wealth of PStricks examples are available. My work is similar to the work of Don Lancaster. The files I submit are the ps pictures and the plain TeX source code. I process it by pdfTeX.

I suppose that GUST works along similar lines. I have no experience in how to submit to a general publisher. Kees van der Laan. IF you want to print a document, especially in a large batch print facility, you use PostScript.

I avoid using pdf, if pdf is all I can find then I first convert it with ghostscript. PDF has plenty of security and privacy issues. Most PDF viewers have zero focus on privacy, postscript files don't have nearly as many "features" i. However, I wouldn't trust printers to not be vulnerable to filesystem access from postscript files. In circumstances requiring privacy the use of PDF as opposed to PostScript should be considered a hostile act.

Postscript is still important for people who need to create documents programmatically. Imagine you need to create a nice printable document based on an input from a user.

Since you do not know what the input would be like, your document cannot be created beforehand. It has to be created on the fly. LaTeX is well designed for this kind of task but, unless your application is web based, you need to have LaTeX installed on the user's machine, which is not always feasible.

On the other hand, PostScript viewers are ubiquitous and free, e. The practical reason why they ask for postscript is because they want the highest possible quality source file. It is possible to use better quality settings than the defaults when generating a PDF, but people tend not to. No matter what interprets the code the values become baked in at the point it is run. The quality is already lost. Printer toolchains have been able to easily convert between PS and PDF for over a decade, it isn't a legacy issue.