You are now entering the PC Anatomy portal

PostScript is a page description language and vector graphics file format used to describe the appearance of text, graphics, and images for printing and displaying. Created by Adobe in the 1980s, it was a pivotal technology in the desktop publishing industry.

Key characteristics

Page description language: PostScript is a complete, dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is not a data file but a program that is interpreted by an output device, such as a laser printer, to produce a printed page.

Device-independent: PostScript files describe a page in geometric and text-based terms rather than as a fixed-resolution bitmap image. This means a PostScript file can be sent to any PostScript-compatible printer and will produce a high-quality, consistent output at the highest resolution the device is capable of.

Vector-based: At its core, PostScript uses mathematical commands to draw shapes and position text. It does not rely on pixel-by-pixel descriptions. This vector-based approach allows for scalable images that can be enlarged or reduced without any loss of quality.

Plain text format: A PostScript file is typically a plain text file that can be read and edited, though it is not human-friendly to write manually.