Customer Reviews

PostScript® Language Tutorial and Cookbook

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Imagine this: you are tasked to be responsible for understanding the PostScript language. Perhaps because you need to troubleshoot printing issues, or because you want to write specialized drivers for a custom system. Where to start?

Many recommend that you can get these sorts of resources on the web for free. That's is true, but I prefer to take into account the true cost of doing so. I can't speak for you, but my time is worth more than trying to save a few bucks downloading and printing my own version.

Most tasked with understanding PostScript are typically given the monolithic PostScript Language Reference Manual and perhaps a supplement. If you lack exposure to PostScript, this is a huge and perhaps impossible leap towards PostScript proficiency.

This book goes a long way towards helping the reader quickly understand the basic foundation of PostScript. The book itself is short, small, and easy to read. In fact, its helpful to imagine it as a "PostScript sing a long."

Most higher end PostScript printers support network socket connections directly to the PostScript interpreter, meaning that you can connect and actually work directly with the PostScript monster. Write me and ask if you want to know how.

I found it helpful to simply sit by a computer with this book, read some pages, then duplicate the programs the book illustrates. If your printer supports the socket connections, great. Connect and enter the code directly. Try creating syntatic errors and watch how the PostScript interpreter responds. Understanding these errors goes a long way towards effectively troubleshooting PostScript.

Alternately, you can enter the PostScript code into files, and download them to the printer. Most printers support a verbose debug mode, enabling you to see why the PostScript programs were rejected by the interpreter. This too is rather helpful, educationally and practically.

If you need to learn PostScript, and lack any exposure, get this book. But it will leave you in PostScript first grade...more resources listed in my other reviews pertaining to PostScript.

This books gives very good start for the programmer who want to learn postscript.

This book is a great start to postscript programming, but it leaves out some very important details. I found that if you wanted to include images into your postscript file this book is no help at all. Most of the examples in the book you can find on the web, and if you dig a little you will find this entire book in pdf format on the web. My recommendation is to not spend the money.

This book is good for beginner who are writting some basic program. May not be good for advance programming.

This is the book that everyone who wants to draw illustrations directly in the PostScript language should have. [ For an even easier introduction, one may also consult the web page of Eric Weeks ]. Since most printers today use the PostScript language internally, it is clear that everything a printer can do, can be done by programming directly in the PostScript language. PostScript is like the gate that every file destined to be printed, must walk through. Hence anything that isn't PostScript is either stripped away and discarded, or is translated to PostScript before being allowed to pass through.

One of the problems with current PostScript files, is that they have usually been produced by automatic conversion from various user application output files. The result is files that cannot be meaningfully read by humans : Inspecting them merely gives the user an impression of what computer-generated chaos can look like. But it need not be that way : If a human being writes graphic instructions directly in the PostScript language, the ps file may be structured and commented, so that it becomes readable and editable for the normal user, provided he has learned the rudiments of the language, and the ps file sticks with the most elementary ps commands, that may be assumed to form part of every ps user's basic vocabulary.

The advantages of writing graphics instructions directly in the PostScript language are twofold :
i) Extremely small files
ii) The output is vector graphics, which means that the images may be arbitrarily magnified without losing any sharpness.
As a third point, I wish to mention that today the route from PostScript to PDF is extremely short and easy. For example, under the Mac OS X system, the standard application "Preview" will immediately open the ps file, and display it in the built in screen PDF format. From Preview one only needs to "Save" the file as PDF. An alternative is to use either Ghostscript, or Adobe's own "Acrobat Distiller", which may give certain advantages.

This was the book I used to learn PostScript years ago. It is a very good introduction to PostScript programming. Sadly the book has not been updated since 1985, and only covers level-1 PostScript. Any additions to the language after that (such as color) are not addressed at all.