{"id":11005,"date":"2022-12-10T13:55:16","date_gmt":"2022-12-10T18:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11005"},"modified":"2022-12-10T13:55:16","modified_gmt":"2022-12-10T18:55:16","slug":"the-origins-of-postscript","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=11005","title":{"rendered":"The Origins of PostScript"},"content":{"rendered":"

The IEEE Spectrum<\/a> has a lovely article<\/a> about the origins and early history of PostScript and how it jumpstarted desktop publishing and arguably digital printing. Most Irreal readers probably know the rudiments of the story. PostScript was developed at Adobe Systems for electronic printing and rapidly became the standard for digital printers.<\/p>\n

The actual story is more complicated. Previous digital printing technology involved producing handcrafted bitmapped images of each character in each font of each typeface. Adobe\u2019s plan was to describe each character of a typeface mathematically (using B\u00e9zier curves) and scale (or even rotate) the descriptions mathematically for each font.<\/p>\n

One of the hardest problems was dealing with the different resolutions of various printers. The 300 DPI resolution of the early laser printers were from different from the, say, 1200 DPI of commercial printers. The fix involves flipping bits at the critical points of a character where the jaggedness appears at lower resolutions. This was accomplished by means of \u201chints\u201d for each character and associated procedures for each resolution.<\/p>\n

One of the interesting parts of the article was a video of Chuck Geschke talking about how Adobe came to focus on PostScript. The original plan, as I understand it, was to produce computer driven printing presses. Early on, both DEC and Apple approached Adobe and said essentially the same thing: \u201cWe already from computers and have a deal with a printer manufacturer for a printer but we\u2019re having trouble getting the computer to talk to the printer. Sell us your software.\u201d In both cases Adobe demurred, citing its business plan and its obligations under it. Later one of their investors said that DEC and APPLE had been right and that they should focus on the software that later became PostScript.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a really interesting article and well worth a few minutes of your time. These days, of course, PostScript has pretty much taken over digital printing and it\u2019s worth taking a look at how it all began.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The IEEE Spectrum has a lovely article about the origins and early history of PostScript and how it jumpstarted desktop publishing and arguably digital printing. Most Irreal readers probably know the rudiments of the story. PostScript was developed at Adobe … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-11005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11006,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11005\/revisions\/11006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}