Product Description
Presents a complete and authoritative reference manual for the PostScript language.Explains the fundamentals of the PostScript language, graphics, fonts, device control, and rendering.Softcover. DLC: PostScript (Computer program language).Amazon.com Review
Programmers who specialize in PostScript, the page-descriptionlanguage, now have a newly updated reference guide for LanguageLevel3. PostScript® Language Reference starts off with a bit ofhistory on the language and an overview of the new version. It goes onto cover basic topics such as raster output devices, scan conversion,and page-description languages in general.

PostScript®Language Reference provides an overview of how to use thePostScript interpreter and understand the ideal structure ofPostScript page descriptions. The book covers the heart of thelanguage, including syntax, data types and objects, stacks, execution,basic operators, memory management, file input/output (I/O),functions, errors, and filtered-files and binary-encodingdetails. Subsequent chapters cover graphics, fonts, device control,rendering, and operators.

The appendices include a LanguageLevelfeature summary, implementation limits, interpreter parameters,compatibility issues, character sets, encoding vectors, system-nameencodings, and operator-usage guidelines. There's also a bibliographywith additional reading recommendations. --Kathleen Caster ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Called the "PostScript Bible" for good reason
If you are going to be working with PostScript you will need this book (widely refered to as the "Red Book.")

It is indeed THE reference for PostScript, but the organizational aspects of the book itself are a bit confusing until you understand some PostScript fundementals and have a grasp for some oddball "Adobeisms."

In addition to this book I've always made a habit of leveraging the "suppliments" released for each version of an interpreter.

For example, PostScript level 2 actually consists of several versions of level 2 interpreter (2011, 2015, etc) all of which have associated supplements describing specific features supported (or not.)The supplements are available for download from Adobe's developer side of their web site (they are often far smaller than the Red Book, and absolutely indespensible.)

Additionally, each manufacturer who OEMs an Adobe interpreter sometimes release documentation pertaining to which specific features within an interpreter version are supported, and how.

For example, companies often develop specialized applications built upon frameworks provided by Adobe in an interpreter version.Understanding the customized PostScript commands for these applications enables you to take full advantage of them.

Either way, buy the book.Don't waste your time downloading it.Sure, that's "tree friendly" but we all know it will end up getting printed anyway.

Indespensible but Downloadable
If you're like me and just need to do a little bit with the language, you will need this book but you might want to consider downloading it directly from Adobe.They have it, in its entirety, in pdf format.(Why not postscript?!)On the otherhand, if you are going to be using this language alot, you will probably just want to buy the book seeing how an 897 page pdf is a bit unweildy.

Essential reference
This manual - the 'Red Book' - is absolutely necessary for programming inPostScript. It is the only complete reference guide to the language, and isso well-organized and thorough that no one else even bothers to publish acomplete third-party guide. Many other books have been published onPostScript - and many are excellent - but they are books you will buy inaddition to, rather than instead of, this manual. We can only wish thatother software manuals were as well-written.

Great book but outdated!
If you want to program in PostScript, you must have this manual. However, you need the newer version, since this second edition only covers version 2of the PostScript language. The third edition covers version 3, and you canfind it for sale here on Amazon using ISBN 0-201-37922-8.

Very complete!
Clear, easy to understand and complete. Very good ... Read more

Product Description
This new implementation of the PostScript language already implemented in DECand NeXT machines is introduced to the reader step-by-step in sample programsthat demonstrate its fundamental concepts, techniques, and features. ... Read more

Product Description
This book gives novices an introduction to Postscript--the state-of-the-art ingredient that drives Apple's LaserWriter printer. It also includes practical cookbook examples. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Great book, but very dated
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.

Highly recommended as a beginner's resource
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.

A little basic for most needs.
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.

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

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

Product Description
Introduces the Postscript programming language, describes the imaging model, and discusses emulators, page design, program structure, scanned images, file merging, and error handling. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I didn't really need to know THAT much about PostScript!
This is a book intended for those who want to write drivers and stuff.I'm not that guy.I just want to know enough about how it works to respond to needs as they arise.

You know?Just because I want a web server on my machine doesn't mean I want to write an HTTP stack from scratch.I'll probably just find what works and adapt it to my purposes.

Here's a specific example relative to PostScript:

I needed to create an application for someone who wanted a custom driver that would print different state-related labels on their printed images.

Did I run off to the Program Design book to figure out how to write it from scratch?No way, man.My advanced status within the cigarette consumption community requires continued proficiency through hourly breaks, thus making this sort of focused activity quite impossible.

Instead I looked in other drivers that had what I wanted, then printed to file, viewed source, and then pulled the code out as I felt appropriate.Quick, relatively easy, and demonstratively slothful.

Get this book if you want to learn how to write drivers.Better, get this book and display it prominently so others think you know how to write PostScript drivers.

Just get this book.Hell, its worth the money.

Caution: Not a beginner's guide to postscript!
I consider myself a hardcore programmer, but I have not programmed with postscript before. When my job required postscript options added to the printer drivers, I started with this book. I now believe it would have been better to start with a beginner's guide and a reference manual on postscript. This book is great if you are already programming in postscript and want to better your skills with it ... Read more

Product Description
Provides carefully designed examples to show readers how to design and execute effective PostScript and PostScript Level 2 programs, generate their own customized PostScript codes, and deal with fonts, text, and printing devices. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Wrong definitions
The book provides too many examples. Some of them (30%) are useful.
The rest are boring. The definition of the Current Transformation matrix is wrong (colums and rows are exchanged) showing that the author has no idea about linear algebra and matrix products.
However this is the only book available for me, so I had to learn
PS with it.

wonderful book for PostScript novices
This is an extremely helpful book, *if* you are a little familiar with PostScript and want to know more.Although it suffers a bit from lack of organization, the subsections are fairly self-contained and are generally extremely clear. As a hobbyist, my primary interest is in PostScript drawing rather than text manipulation, and this book has good coverage of drawing and graphics. My understanding of PostScript was greatly deepened by this book. (I finally understand dictionaries!)PostScript level 2 is discussed in some detail, which is unusual among the available texts.I have looked at several books and have not found a better intermediate level text.

Didn't benefit much by reading it
In fact, I could barely get through it.

My introduction to PostScript was through the Language Reference Manual and the Supplements.Plus it was quite helpfil that I was surrounded by PostScript gurus.

By the time I got this book it read like a Dr. Suess novel.Bored, I was.

Skip it.

Not enough definition
Although this book could be useful to the person who cares nothing of how things work, I found it extremely lacking in the area of defining the way Postscript works.From the outset, the book shows many examples which theauthors touts as the best way to learn something.However, many of theexamples used have little or no explanation of some of the cryptic commandscontained within.You end up wasting a lot of time scratching your headtrying to find out *what* is going on.It becomes a matter of wadingthrough the entire book since many terms are not even listed in the index. A glossary and perhaps a command reference would have been extremely usefulin this book.

Too much graphics, not enough text
Although I found this book to be accurate, I did not enjoy it. Concepts jumped from chapter to chapter without any order. The index is totally lacking. It covered graphics completely but failed on handling bitmaps. Itleft text formatting to your imagination. As a programmer, I need to createreports. This book left me out in the cold. If you want to manipulategraphics using PostScript this book is for you. If you want to produce aspreadsheet on PostScript look elsewhere. ... Read more

Product Description
This book explains how to write applications that describe information for the screen and printer using the Display PostScript system. Through discussion, pictures, diagrams, and sample code, specific tips and techniques of writing graphically sophisticated applications are covered. ... Read more

Product Description
Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Forth, Postscript, Factor, Cat, Hartmann Pipeline, Joy, Colorforth, Concatenative Programming Language, Abundance, Gforth, Pforth, Onyx. Excerpt:Paradigm : stack Abundance is a Forth -inspired programming language for DOS , created by Roedy Green . History Roedy Green implemented Abundance in 1981 as a platform for data entry and management , as part of the volunteer work he was doing for The Hunger Project in Canada. The name is a reference to the goal of "serving charities working to create an Abundance of food water and shelter on the planet", and was coined by Esther Palivoda. (Roedy originally planned to call it "Enough".) Jaunting One unconventional feature of Abundance is the use of continuations to implement data entry form navigation, in a process known as "jaunting". Jaunting works by saving a continuation for every data field that the user enters, and restoring the associated continuation when a particular field needs to be made active. This approach allows complicated data validation rules to be written in a simple linear style, while allowing the user to jump between fields in a non-linear fashion. Trivia References (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at The Cat programming language is a functional stack-oriented programming language inspired by the Joy programming language . Joy and Cat differ from most functional languages (e.g. Scheme , Haskell ) and language formalisms (e.g. lambda calculus , combinatory logic ) in that they are based on the composition of functions rather than function application. Cat and Joy both bear more resemblance to combinatorial logic calculi (such as the SKI calculus or the B,C,K,W system ) than to the lambda calculus due to the lack of names. The Cat language was designed with static typing in mind, and as such th... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Very Brief Description of Some Concatenative Programming Languages
This book is not worth $19.99. The PDF version of the book is available at booksllc.net for $9.99. I have only seen the paperback version so I can not comment on the PDF version.

The product description states that purchase of the book includes free access to book updates online. I have not been able to find the updates. The links mentioned in the book don't go where they are suposed to.

This book is a very brief description, sometimes with a little history and code snippets, of a number of concatenative programming languages.

Forth and Postscript get the most attention.

The next group of languages get a few pages of attention: Cat, Factor, Hartmann Pipeline, Joy.

The next group of languages get a page of attention: Colorforth.

1/2 a page is dedicated to each of the following programming languages: Abundance, Gforth, Pforth.

Onyx is mentioned on a page. No details whatsoever are provided. ... Read more

Product Description
Explains the fundamentals of the PostScript language using a complete set of sample programmes and covers all the features of PostScript including new forms handling, graphics, colour operations and fonts. ... Read more

Product Description
This book/disk package deals with the page description language PostScript and how to best exploit it for use with laser printers. The computer disk contains programming examples for stand-alone printing projects. ... Read more

Product Description
Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Postscript, Befunge, Poplog, Stack-Oriented Programming Language, Dc, Rpl, Factor, False, Cat, Mouse, Joy, Piet, Abundance, Z, Lapis, Millscript, Parakeet, Onyx. Excerpt: PostScript (PS) is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 when John Warnock was working at Evans ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing, Basic English, Xml, Application Programming Interface, Postscript, Html, Scientific Journal, Faq, Ontology, Procedural Memory, Procedure, Rich Text Format, Sharable Content Object Reference Model, Software Documentation, Standard Generalized Markup Language, Configuration Management, Internationalization and Localization, Revision Control, Hardware Description Language, Undocumented Feature, How-To, Docbook, Linux Network Administrators' Guide, Rtfm, Schematic, Channel, Man Page, Topic Maps, History of Virtual Learning Environments, Usability, List of Energy Abbreviations, Upper Ontology, Sxml, Semantic Interoperability, List of Unified Modeling Language Tools, Style Guide, Metadata, Learning Object Metadata, Iso 15926, History of Personal Learning Environments, Interaction Design, Controlled Vocabulary, Flowchart, Office Assistant, Scientific Literature, Academic Journal, Single Source Publishing, Encoded Archival Description, User-Centered Design, Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Ims Vdex, Microsoft Compiled Html Help, Microlearning, Seven Stages of Action, Technical Writing, Copy Editing, Electronic Performance Support Systems, Ebxml, Information Architecture, Process Development Execution System, Legal Case Management, Ann Rockley, Doctest, Western Electric Rules, Crosswalk, Advanced Distributed Learning, Datasheet, Ims Global, Haynes Manual, Martin Documentation, Ontology Engineering, Internationalization Tag Set, Technical Writer, Techwr-L, Universal Data Element Framework, Mets, Procedural Knowledge, Simplified English, Sequence Theory, Technical Communication Tools, Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators, General Formal Ontology, White Paper, Distinguo, Table of Contents, English Writing Style, Society for Technical Communication, Nelson Rules, Ontology for Biomedical Investigations, Report, Knowledge Management Software, Technical Documentation, S...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=25012873 ... Read more

Product Description
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! PostScript (PS) is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. PostScript is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 when John Warnock was working at Evans & Sutherland, a famous computer graphics company. At that time John Warnock was developing an interpreter for a large three-dimensional graphics database of New York harbor. Warnock conceived the Design System language to process the graphics. Concurrently, researchers at Xerox PARC had developed the first laser printer and had recognized the need for a standard means of defining page images. In 1975-76 a team led by Bob Sproull developed the Press format, which was eventually used in the Xerox Star system to drive laser printers. But Press, a data format rather than a language, lacked flexibility, and PARC mounted the InterPress effort to create a successor. ... Read more

Product Description
This book covers the whole range of PostScript and PDF (Adobe Acrobat) application fields. It explains how several components work together and shows how to solve problems that may arise in practice without getting involved in PostScript programming. Since a major focus of the book is the solution of cross-platform problems using MS-DOS, Windows (3.X and 95), Macintosh and Unix, neither the book nor the tools are limited to a particular platform or operating system. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An excellent tutorial for prepress support people
I work for a major supplier of prepress hard- and software. It is often difficult to find accurate extensive backgroud information on essential technologies like PostScript or PDF and this book fills this voidperfectly. It is a goldmine if you want to look beyond the simple"select this, click that" type of manuals and take an detailedlook at the way PostScript, drivers, printercommunication,... work. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Array Programming Languages, Stack-Oriented Programming Languages, Fortran, Postscript, Apl, Gnu Octave, J, Befunge, Mathematica, Matlab, Nial, Poplog, Scilab, Idl, Supercollider, Dc, Rpl, Factor, False, Cat, Numpy, Mouse, Admb, Perl Data Language, Ilnumerics.net, Joy, Sac Programming Language, F-Script, Lush, Data Language Interface, Yorick, A+, Data-Structured Language, Freemat, Imtek Mathematica Supplement, Piet, Genius, S-Lang, Abundance, Q, Zpl, Sysquake, Adenine, Jlab, Rlab, Jmathlib, O-Matrix, Ana, Ngl, Nesl, Aplx, Comsol Script, Lyapas, Mex File, Fish, Lapis, Millscript, Parakeet, Onyx. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 268. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Fortran (previously FORTRAN; blends derived from IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, computational chemistry, and electricity supply systems state estimation. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers. Fortran encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while usually retaining compatibility with previous versions. Successive versions have added support for processing of character-based data (FORTR...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=11168 ... Read more