Preface - Adobe

CHAPTER 3
30
Language
If the character following the \ is not in the preceding list, the scanner ignores the
\. If the \ is followed immediately by a newline (CR, LF, or CR-LF pair), the scanner
ignores both the initial \ and the newline; this breaks a string into multiple
lines without including the newline character as part of the string, as in the following
example:
(These \
two strings \
are the same.)
(These two strings are the same.)
But if a newline appears without a preceding \, the result is equivalent to \n. For
example:
(This string has a newline at the end of it.
)
(So does this one.\n)
For more information about end-of-line conventions, see Section 3.8, “File Input
and Output.”
The \ddd form may be used to include any 8-bit character constant in a string.
One, two, or three octal digits may be specified, with high-order overflow ignored.
This notation is preferred for specifying a character outside the recommended
ASCII character set for the PostScript language, since the notation itself
stays within the standard set and thereby avoids possible difficulties in transmitting
or storing the text of the program. It is recommended that three octal digits
always be used, with leading zeros as needed, to prevent ambiguity. The string
(\0053), for example, contains two characters—an ASCII 5 (Control-E) followed
by the digit 3—whereas the strings (\53) and (\053) contain one character, the
ASCII character whose code is octal 53 (plus sign).
Hexadecimal Strings
A hexadecimal string consists of a sequence of hexadecimal digits (0–9 and either
A–F or a–f) enclosed within < and >. Each pair of hexadecimal digits defines one
character of the string. White-space characters are ignored. If a hexadecimal
string contains characters outside the allowed character set, a syntaxerror occurs.
Hexadecimal strings are useful for including arbitrary binary data as literal text.