macmillan%wnre.aecl.cdn%ubc.CSNET@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA (John MacMillan) (05/21/86)
What is POSTSCRIPT? (referred to in the description of the PRINTSERVER 40 in the DECUS trip report from <CUNNINGHAM%HAW.SDSCNET@LLL-MFE.arpa>) John MacMillan Atomic Energy of Canada Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment Pinawa, MB, Canada R0E 1L0 (204) 753-2311 ext. 2539
Rudy.Nedved@A.CS.CMU.EDU (05/22/86)
PostScript is a new standard (of sorts) for communicating with a printer. The standard is actually a stack oriented language based on the language Forth and has fairly powerful primitives for doing graphics. The powerful primitives and the power of the language allow you to produce very detailed and varying graphics....text to simple geometric shapes to various level of shading of polygons to raw bit maps. A good chunk of the people that developed PostScript are from Xerox but now have formed or work for a company called Adobe. Of course within a year of Adobe building up clients -- Xerox came out with InterPress which was rumored to exists in some form for several years. Given Adobe is a responsive company, the PostScript language is powerful and flexiable and the printers out there that understand PostScript fit CMU's needs (at least in quality -- speed and duty cycle is another thing), it looks like PostScript is at least a CMU printing file format standard. -Rudy