[Tex/LaTex] Why do people still use Postscript

postscript

I submitted a journal paper this morning, and they asked me to include a PDF file, which I expected, and a Postscript (PS) file.

Generating the PS file proved more difficult, because some of my LaTeX commands, which I always compiled with pdflatex, wouldn't compile with latex (in particular including graphics).

I ended up converting the PDF into a PS file, but obtained a file 4 times the size (approx 20 MB instead of 5 MB).

It also seems that opening a Postscript file with any modern reader takes longer, as it has to 'convert' (compile maybe? or interpret?) the file.

I was wondering — what's the use of Postscript today? Are there advantages over the more modern and widely used PDF?

Best Answer

Postscript is still used as an intermediate document format, since it is a fully fledged programming language allowing you to compute graphics, which PDF doesn't. PDF shows just the result (after some conversions, sometimes called "Distillation") of the computation Postscript is able to do.

The Postscript based PSTricks package is an example that heavily makes use of graphical computation. It can even solve differential equations. And if you have a Postscript printer, it can do these computations for you.

EDIT, to answer Daniels comment:

One feature that makes Postscript the preferred format, in particular for a publisher, is its editability. If, for instance, line art in a document is too faint, the publisher may want to enhance it a bit globally before giving the document to press. This very issue was raised, e. g., in this question.

With Postscript, doubling the line width in the whole document is easily accomplished by putting

userdict /setlinewidth {2 mul systemdict /setlinewidth get exec} put

into the document header.

With PDF such a tweak is much more complicated.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to write a bounding box information in PostScript to an external file and read it in TeX at the second compilation

I'm not sure of the requirements for reading the info back into TeX, but you can get the bounding box information from ghostscript formatted as a DSC comment.

gs -sDEVICE=bbox file.ps

This will print 2 lines to stderr in response to each showpage event.

%%BoundingBox: 51 93 511 731
%%HiResBoundingBox: 51.335998 93.131997 510.209984 730.061978

%%BoundingBox: 23 83 587 765
%%HiResBoundingBox: 23.147999 83.087997 586.331982 764.801977

(The extra blank line was when I hit enter for the invisible showpage prompt. Invisible because I redirected stdout to get a nice picture of stderr.)

To capture it in a file, we need to wrangle the stderr handle.

gs -sDEVICE=bbox file.ps 2>file.bbi

Some other useful options are -dBATCH: exit after the file (otherwise it goes to a PS> prompt), and -dNOPAUSE: do not wait for enter at showpage.

If we can control how the shell-out to gs is handled, it might be possible to pipe the postscript fragment without an additional intermediate file.

??? | gs -q -sDEVICE=bbox -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH - 2>&1 | ???

This assumes the postscript program makes no interfering text output of its own.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to write a bounding box information in PostScript to an external file and read it in TeX at the second compilation

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