PostScript was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984.

Concurrently, researchers at Xerox PARC had developed the first laser printer and had recognized the need for a standard means of defining page images.

In 1975–76 Bob Sproull and William Newman developed the Press format, which was eventually used in the Xerox Star system to drive laser printers.

But Press, a data format rather than a language, lacked flexibility, and PARC mounted the Interpress effort to create a successor.

They, together with Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton created a simpler language, similar to Interpress, called PostScript, which went on the market in 1984.

[7] In December 1983, the two companies finally signed off on the PostScript licensing deal, and Adobe had to shift focus immediately from high-end, high-resolution printing devices to the consumer-oriented Apple LaserWriter laser printer.

[9] In response, Warnock and Brotz solved the so-called "appearance problem" of making the stem width of letters scale properly so that they look good at all resolutions.

)[13] The combination of technical merits and widespread availability made PostScript the language of choice for graphical output for printing applications.

[citation needed] There were a number of technologies for this task, but most shared the property that the glyphs were physically difficult to change, as they were stamped onto typewriter keys, bands of metal, or optical plates.

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 is noteworthy for implementing on-the-fly rasterization in which everything, even text, is specified in terms of straight lines and cubic Bézier curves (previously found only in CAD applications), which allows arbitrary scaling, rotating and other transformations.

PostScript avoided this problem with the inclusion of font hinting, in which additional information is provided in horizontal or vertical bands to help identify the features in each letter that are important for the rasterizer to maintain.

Type 1 was effectively a simplification of the PS system to store outline information only, as opposed to being a complete language (PDF is similar in this regard).

Retail tools such as Altsys Fontographer (acquired by Macromedia in January 1995, owned by FontLab since May 2005) added the ability to create Type 1 fonts.

In the early 1990s, there were several other systems for storing outline-based fonts, developed by Bitstream and Metafont for instance, but none included a general-purpose printing solution and they were therefore not widely used.

In the late 1990s, Adobe joined Microsoft in developing OpenType, essentially a functional superset of the Type 1 and TrueType formats.

[15] In the 1980s, Adobe drew most of its revenue from the licensing fees for their implementation of PostScript for printers, known as a raster image processor or RIP.

This and issues of cost led to third-party implementations of PostScript becoming common, particularly in low-cost printers (where the licensing fee was the sticking point) or in high-end typesetting equipment (where the quest for speed demanded support for new platforms faster than Adobe could provide).

Apple ended up reaching an accord with Adobe and licensed genuine PostScript for its printers, but TrueType became the standard outline font technology for both Windows and the Macintosh.

Other third-party PostScript solutions used by print and MFP manufacturers include Jaws[17] and the Harlequin RIP, both by Global Graphics.

PostScript became commercially successful due to the introduction of the graphical user interface (GUI), allowing designers to directly lay out pages for eventual output on laser printers.

In order to take full advantage of PostScript printing, applications on the computers had to re-implement those features using the host platform's own graphics system.

This led to numerous issues where the on-screen layout would not exactly match the printed output, due to differences in the implementation of these features.

However, PostScript was written with printing in mind, and had numerous features that made it unsuitable for direct use in an interactive display system.

When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he pitched Adobe on the idea of using PS as the display system for his new workstation computers.

A PDF document is a static data structure made for efficient access and embeds navigational information suitable for interactive viewing.

The language syntax uses reverse Polish notation, which makes the order of operations unambiguous, but reading a program requires some practice, because one has to keep the layout of the stack in mind.

Thus: For example, in order to draw a vertical line of 4 cm length, it is sufficient to type: More readably and idiomatically, one might use the following equivalent, which demonstrates a simple procedure definition and the use of the mathematical operators mul and div: (Technically, most printers have a construction-implied unprintable margin around the physical borders of the sheet, and the 0 0 coordinates are calibrated to its corner,[19]: section 4.3.1  so you might have to use a different starting point to actually see something.)