Prior to the introduction of PostScript, printers were designed to print character output given the text-typically in ASCII-as input. PostScript 3 was significant in terms of replacing the existing proprietary color electronic prepress systems, then widely used for magazine production, through the introduction of smooth shading operations with up to 4096 shades of grey (rather than the 256 available in PostScript Level 2), as well as DeviceN, a color space that allowed the addition of additional ink colors (called spot colors) into composite color pages. PostScript 3 (Adobe dropped the "level" terminology in favor of simple versioning) came at the end of 1997, and along with many new dictionary-based versions of older operators, introduced better color handling and new filters (which allow in-program compression/decompression, program chunking, and advanced error-handling). PostScript Level 2 was introduced in 1991, and included several improvements: improved speed and reliability, support for in-Raster Image Processing (RIP) separations, image decompression (for example, JPEG images could be rendered by a PostScript program), support for composite fonts, and the form mechanism for caching reusable content. The suffix Level 1 was added when Level 2 was introduced. The first version of the PostScript language was released to the market in 1984. On high-end printers, PostScript processors remain common, and their use can dramatically reduce the CPU work involved in printing documents, transferring the work of rendering PostScript images from the computer to the printer. By 2001, few lower-end printer models came with support for PostScript, largely due to growing competition from much cheaper non-PostScript ink jet printers, and new software-based methods to render PostScript images on the computer, making them suitable for any printer PDF, a descendant of PostScript, provides one such method, and has largely replaced PostScript as de facto standard for electronic document distribution. But as printer mechanisms fell in price, the cost of implementing PS became too great a fraction of overall printer cost in addition, with desktop computers becoming more powerful, it no longer made sense to offload the rasterization work onto the resource-constrained printer.
When the laser printer engines themselves cost over a thousand dollars the added cost of PS was marginal.
The LaserWriter used a 12 MHz Motorola 68000, making it faster than any of the Macintosh computers to which it attached. This required high performance microprocessors and ample memory.
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However, the cost of implementation was high computers output raw PS code that would be interpreted by the printer into a raster image at the printer's natural resolution. For a time an interpreter (sometimes referred to as a RIP for Raster Image Processor) for the PostScript language was a common component of laser printers, into the 1990s. The combination of technical merits and widespread availability made PostScript a language of choice for graphical output for printing applications. In March 1985, the Apple LaserWriter was the first printer to ship with PostScript, sparking the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution in the mid-1980s. At about this time they were visited by Steve Jobs, who urged them to adapt PostScript to be used as the language for driving laser printers. They, together with Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton created a simpler language, similar to Interpress, called PostScript, which went on the market in 1984. Warnock left with Chuck Geschke and founded Adobe Systems in December 1982. This work later evolved and expanded into the Interpress language. In 1978 John Gaffney and Martin Newell then at Xerox PARC wrote J & M or JaM (for "John and Martin") which was used for VLSI design and the investigation of type and graphics printing. But Press, a data format rather than a language, lacked flexibility, and PARC mounted the Interpress effort to create a successor. In 1975-76 Bob Sproull and William Newman developed the Press format, which was eventually used in the Xerox Star system to drive laser printers. At that time Gaffney and John Warnock were developing an interpreter for a large three-dimensional graphics database of New York Harbor.Ĭoncurrently, researchers at Xerox PARC had developed the first laser printer and had recognized the need for a standard means of defining page images. The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 by John Gaffney at Evans & Sutherland, a computer graphics company.