Editing PostScript (section)

=== PostScript printing ===
Laser printers combine the best features of both printers and plotters. Like plotters, laser printers offer high-quality line art, and like dot-matrix printers, they are able to generate pages of text and raster graphics.  Unlike either printers or plotters, a laser printer makes it possible to position high-quality graphics and text on the same page.  PostScript made it possible to fully exploit these characteristics by offering a single control language that could be used on any brand of printer.

PostScript went beyond the typical printer control language and was a complete programming language of its own. Many applications can transform a document into a PostScript program, the execution of which results in the original document. This program can be sent to an [[interpreter (computing)|interpreter]] in a printer, which results in a printed document, or to one inside another application, which will display the document on-screen. Since the document-program is the same regardless of its destination, it is called ''device-independent''.

PostScript is noteworthy for implementing on-the-fly [[rasterization]] in which everything, even text, is specified in terms of straight lines and cubic [[Bézier curve]]s (previously found only in [[Computer-aided design|CAD]] applications), which allows arbitrary scaling, rotating and other transformations. When the PostScript program is interpreted, the interpreter converts these instructions into the dots needed to form the output. For this reason, PostScript interpreters are occasionally called PostScript [[Raster Image Processor|raster image processor]]s, or RIPs.