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Preface - Adobe

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11<br />

CHAPTER 2<br />

2Basic Ideas<br />

OBTAINING A COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING of the PostScript language<br />

requires considering it from several points of view:<br />

• As a general-purpose programming language with powerful built-in graphics<br />

primitives<br />

• As a page description language that includes programming features<br />

• As an interactive system for controlling raster output devices (printers and<br />

displays)<br />

• As an application- and device-independent interchange format for page descriptions<br />

This chapter presents some basic ideas that are essential to understanding the<br />

problems the PostScript language is designed to solve and the environments in<br />

which it is designed to operate. Terminology introduced here appears throughout<br />

the manual.<br />

2.1 Raster Output Devices<br />

Much of the power of the PostScript language derives from its ability to deal with<br />

the general class of raster output devices. This class encompasses such technology<br />

as laser, dot-matrix, and ink-jet printers, digital imagesetters, and raster scan<br />

displays.<br />

The defining property of a raster output device is that a printed or displayed image<br />

consists of a rectangular array of dots, called pixels (picture elements), that<br />

can be addressed individually. On a typical black-and-white output device, each<br />

pixel can be made either black or white. On certain devices, each pixel can be set

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