Postscript and pdf formats

Brecht Machiels Brecht Machiels 2, 3 3 gold badges 21 21 silver badges 35 35 bronze badges. It's not clear what does your application. Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Seth Seth Does postscript print 1 page at a time; whereas, PDF renders all of it at once, thus increasing print overhead?

I can write programs in PS -- these programs can be interpreted by the printer and be tailored to that printer's resolution. I use a program to generate barcodes for book publishing. Then, I convert them to PDF for embedding and printing using ghostscript. Both technologies have their place. Here are some things to consider: gzipped postscript is often much smaller than an equivalent PDF PDF is basically a generalized container format, if you didn't know that you can embed videos in PDF, that should give you pause PDF contains scripts that have been used for exploits though this may be more the fault of bad PDF reader software.

Chris Chris 2, 24 24 silver badges 42 42 bronze badges. Sadly, the pdfzone. Another description can be found at Adobe. A way for embedding one using TeX can be found at tex. More fully feature, False argument as Postscript is more powerful and can do what PDF can do with less features.

Postscript has to load all of the pages as it is a language. Postscript is missing feature X, True but mostly because of Adobe inventing a new format to make money not because feature X cannot be added to Postscript. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Prior to the development of PostScript, it was not possible to print images and text on the same page. Postscript addressed this by defining a language that allowed applications to instruct the printer how to display objects on the page.

This file type revolutionised publishing allowing certain curved items to be printed that previously could only be printed on specialist CAD printers. Although no longer as popular or common as it was historically, it is still an important file type.

PostScript is actually a programming language as well as a file type. Typically files are created by applications such as Adobe Acrobat or Quark Xpress. Now a legacy file format, most printers and programs continue to support this format, with the only pre-requisite being a printer utility that supports PostScript. The file basically contains a set of instructions that tell the printer what to print and provide the co-ordinates on the page of where an object or text should be printed.

More detail on Microsoft Powerpoint. Microsoft Office binary file format specifications. 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. A PostScript printer reads and comprehends PostScript programs, and then it yields graphical information that is converted to images. It processes instructions from PostScript and shows the results on the computer screen.

This preview is not necessary with InDesign, due to its built-in RIP that enables its opening of files in a native manner. One way that you can utilize PostScript is the following: you can print a file to disk and save it as a single PostScript file.

You can then send it to a print service provider. Alternatively, you can create EPS files and use them to save and distribute graphics.