Is Postscript still alive?
 

A few tears ago, when I got a new laser printer for the company, I made sure it handled Postscript, as we were still getting a lot of stuff written in it. It used to cost an arm and a leg to get Postscript capability, but I just upgraded a printer with PS for about twenty bucks.

I just think that with todays WYSIWYG word processors, TrueType fonts, and PCL, a printer can handle just about anything. I realize that Postscript is (used to be?) the lingua franca of the UNIX and professional publishing worlds, but other than that, is it used much any more?

Very much so.

Sure is .. you can add one of the generic Apple black and white laser printers in windows and specify print to file if you want to generate postscript files. Windows used to have a "generic postscript printer" you could add, but that's disappeared over the years.

ghostview/ghostscript can now generate pdf files.

-David

By whom, and where? I don't see it very much at all in the corporate world. Then again, I'm probably not in an area where I would see it.

Well, you asked if it was still used.

It is still used, but most stuff is distributed in pdf these days.

-David

... which, at the core, is Postscript!

Apple Macintoshes use Postscript as its foundational display technology in OS X.

It's still fairly and broadly deployed, at least here in the UK. When I came to my new company (with my Powerbook), I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the printers in the office were Postscript and PCL.

I think as people become even more sophisticated with the use of color and graphics, it'll be even more widespread. Plus, Adobe isn't as dependent on the money from licensing Postscript, so the cost of adding it isn't really creating the spreads it used to.

I love me some PostScript. It's such an elegant and flexible language.

Timothy

My iMac at home talks to my Lexmark printer in Postscript. Not sure what kind of conversation the Toshiba Laptop has, though!

It's still widely used, but that doesn't mean it is an essential feature for your printer unless you are doing serious graphics/desktop publishing work.

Most color laser printers support it. My HP CLJ4500 at home and all our CLJs at work have it and since I live and die in Adobe apps, I use the Postscript drivers (I'm a Windows user). Now with 600 and 1200dpi printing, I don't use Postscript fonts all that much since the "hints" they encrypted are best for the 300dpi or less devices and a lot of them have restrictions on embedding them in PDFs so your viewers need to have them. I find OpenType to be effective and portable enough (Adobe helped define the standard), especially in conjunction with MS Cleartype (I use all LCD displays).

I still send stuff to the printers' (as in when I'm getting some offset printing done) in EPS format, which is Encapsulated PostScript. In the graphics arena PostScript is still certainly a big deal. For everyday office and home use, it's less so. The medium range HP LaserJets we buy for that sort of use still have PostScript, though. It seems to be bundled with the network enabled versions. And yes, given that PostScript and PDF are both from Adobe, they are somewhat interrelated. There's a lot of PostScript buried in PDF.

That might be with some of the cheaper, non-Adobe provided fonts, but the really high-end Adobe provided PostScript fonts were engineered for 1200 dpi+, as they were used on the Linotype-type printers and the like. On the other hand, TrueType was engineered to look best at 300/600 dpi.

But yes... Acrobat doesn't imbed some of the massively restricted fonts, but what a great program.

Timothy