Postscript

Postscript is a very popular language that is a de facto industry standard. It is capable of describing any document including full colour ones. Take the example.ps you produced earlier and type:-

cat example.ps

This illustrates a number of points:-

• First, and most important, it shows what happens when you send a file to a printer (the terminal in this case) using a language that the printer does not understand. Terminals don't know Postscript so treat it as plain text; you don't get a copy of document as it looked on the laser printer but instead see the Postscript that produced it.

• The output may look odd but at least it doesn't send the terminal crazy because Postscript uses text (rather than binary) file formats. This makes it easy to send such files over the network.

• Postscript is a language that is, with effort readable. With patience you could create a Postscript file from scratch just using an editor.

Encapsulated Postscript is a variant that allows Postscript pictures to be embedded in other documents.