It’s 1984, and if you’ve ever tried to print anything more complex than a text file, you’ve felt the frustration of proprietary printer codes. Every printer has its own language, its own way of handling fonts (if it has fonts at all), and its own resolution limitations. But Adobe’s PostScript is a total paradigm shift. It’s not just a printer command set-it’s a full-blown programming language.
A Turing-Complete Printer?
Yes, you heard that right. PostScript is a stack-based, concatenative programming language designed specifically for describing graphics. Instead of sending a bitmap of what you want to print (which would take ages at these speeds), you send a program that tells the printer how to draw the page.
%!PS
/Courier findfont 24 scalefont setfont
100 700 moveto
(Hello, PostScript world!) show
showpage
The printer itself has its own CPU and memory to interpret these instructions. This is why the first PostScript-capable printers are so expensive-they're practically computers in their own right.
The Power of Vectors
Because PostScript uses mathematical descriptions (vectors) for shapes and fonts, it’s resolution-independent. Whether you’re printing to a 300 DPI laser printer or a high-end typesetter at 1200 DPI, the output is as sharp as the hardware can possibly make it. This is the foundation of what people are starting to call "Desktop Publishing."
A Glimpse into the Future
I suspect we’re going to see a revolution in graphic design because of this. Designers can now see on their screens (well, eventually) what will actually come out on the page. We’re moving away from the "black box" of professional typesetting toward a world where anyone with a Mac and a LaserWriter can be a publisher. I'm already looking into how to write a PostScript driver for our internal reports-it’s that much better.