Essentially - what does it offer that I can’t achieve through PDFs? I’m quite happy sending off PDFs derived from Finale (music notation software), but find people who claim that Acrobat can’t do what they want it to do, and that PostScript is the only way to work. I’ll admit I’m a PC guy since birth (almost literally), so a simple Mac/PC war would be boring. But what am I missing out on without Postscript?
PDF files are compressed, while PS files aren’t. Maybe the PS files look nicer when they’re printed ut?
Postscript was developed to provide a universal platform for the printing industry. The printers I use hate pdf files because the individual elements can’t be adjusted to look right on their presses. Halftones and screens, for example, almost always need some adjustment to print out the same way they look on the monitor.
Postscript is a full-fledged programming language for driving printers. Unlike most programming languages, however, it’s not really intended to be written (or read) by humans, but by word processors, graphics programs, etc. It’s possible to do some very impressive graphics with it by having applications programs that emit clever Postscript code.
Unfortunately, that programming power can be a bit of a problem as well. Like all full-fledge programming languages, Postscript can be used to write programs that take an arbitrarily long time, require an arbitrary amount of memory to wwork, and to write buggy code that gets cuaght in infinite loops. None of these are a good thing when the “computer” executing that code is your printer and you’re standing there waiting for the pages to come out.
PDF was designed as a deliberately limited form of Postscript. The language was “crippled” by removing all loop statements and user-declared functions (to prevent arbitrary recursion). Some standards were imposed on the overall structure of the programs that compute each page. The basic command names were abbreviated (since humans aren’t reading this stuff anyway): the Postscript command “move” became the PDF command “m”, “stroke” became “s”, etc. Finally, the PDF standard added a feature allowing you to (optionally) run the whole program through a compression algorithm before storing it.
That’s a bit over-simplified, but it pretty much captures the spirit of the changes. Postscript and PDF are very closely related, with the older Postscript language actually being more general. That’s why programs like ghostscript that originated as Postscript viewers can also handle PDF.
I used to have to print out my music stuff this way, too. I’d have to print directly to a .PS file, then run it through Adobe Distiller to convert to PDF. I suppose it could have worked either way, but I definitely didn’t know enough about PostScript to do any serious editing. I was more interested in sharing stuff with other people, and I could re-generate a file in no time, anyway.
That’s a lot of what I do in graphic design, av8rmike. There is PDF Writer, which directly creates a PDF file, but it’s only meant for simple text. For anything more complex you have to go the PS to Distiller route. Illustrator can save a file as PDF, but it mucks up things in the long run and makes the file size a lot larger than it needs to be.
It’s worth pointing out that
[ul]
[li]Any Windows program that prints can be used to produce Postscript. Just add a fake printer connected to the FILE: port. For the printer type, select any color Postscript printer (I use the Apple Color LW 12/660 PS). After the printer has been added to your system, open its properties. Under Device Settings, make sure that both “Send CTRL-D…” options are set to “No”. Then find the Postscript Options settings (under XP, choose the General tab, Printing Preferences, Paper/Quality, Advanced, Document Options, then Postscript Options. Set the Postscript output to “Optimize for portability”. Close everything up, and anything printed to this new printer will be saved as a Postscript File.[/li]
[li] Ghostscript and Ghostview are freeware programs that, together, can view Postscript and PDF and can convert between them. Obviously, they’re cheaper than paying for Distiller, but I also find them generally easier to use.[/li][/ul]