What is the background to the birth of 'PostScript', which revolutionized DTP by improving digital printing technology at once?

The development of printing technology has had an impact on a wide range of fields such as academia, politics, commerce, and art. In 1985, Adobe released the page description language PostScript , which made it possible to describe print data as commands. It played a major role in the spread of desktop publishing (DTP) using computers. The Computer History Museum in California, USA, which released the initial source code of PostScript, summarizes how PostScript was born.

Download PostScript
https://info.computerhistory.org/aoc-postscript

PostScript: A Digital Printing Press - CHM
https://computerhistory.org/blog/postscript-a-digital-printing-press/

Adobe is a software company founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke . Mr. Warnock started his computing career as a graduate student at the University of Utah in the 1960s and learned how to draw figures and animations with a geometric approach. And in 1978, Mr. Geshiki, who established an image science lab at Xerox 's Palo Alto Research Institute, hired Mr. Warnock and jointly began developing a device-independent graphics system that works with any computer, display, or printer.

As a result of the research, Warnock and his team succeeded in developing a programming language ' Interpress ' that digitally describes the printed page. It seems that Xerox's upper management was also convinced of the potential of Interpress, but it took time to make it the company's standard technology, and Mr. Warnock and Mr. Geshiki left Xerox during that time.

In the video below, Geshiki explains why he left Xerox to found Adobe. According to Mr. Geshiki, Xerox at that time was unlikely to commercialize Interpress, at least he thought that it would not be released as an international print standard technology, so he decided to become independent with Mr. Warnock. “An engineer's dream is to build something that a lot of people use, and that's the ultimate goal. Frankly, I don't think most engineers are motivated by money. It's the impact that makes it.'

Chuck Geschke discusses the motivations behind the formation of Adobe-YouTube


Adobe, which was established in this way, placed DTP at the center of its business from the beginning, gathered experienced programmers, mainly members of Xerox's Image Science Lab, and started developing a new page description language. In 1984, he successfully developed PostScript.

A characteristic of PostScript is that instead of statically defining individual bitmap images to realize various fonts and character sizes, characters are defined mathematically using a curve drawing method called Bezier curves . It's a point. By mathematically describing characters and images to be printed, it is possible to freely enlarge/reduce the character size, rotate, and move them.

It is also important to ensure that fonts are rendered at different resolutions, so that they do not feel strange when changing resolutions, in order to be independent of the type of display, printer, etc. To solve this problem, Mr. Warnock devised a method of ``correcting the font according to the output resolution and optimizing the appearance''. A few programmers worked on it for months to come up with a system that keeps what matters in the shape of the font, while changing what it doesn't, depending on the resolution.

This resolution-dependent approach and procedure for correcting characters was held as a valuable trade secret by Adobe and was not revealed until its public release in 2010. The source code released by the Computer History Museum dates from February 1984, and although it contains an early version of the code that was later classified as a trade secret, the version that hit the market was written by programmer Bill Paxton in the months that followed. It has been rewritten by Mr.

Adobe licensed PostScript to computer and printer manufacturers, and it was adopted by Apple and others, and PostScript spread at once. PDF , which is used as a file format for documents and images, is also a file format developed based on PostScript.

What is the reason why PDF became widely used all over the world? -GIGAZINE