Home of the PostScript FAQ
PostScript Books: "PostScript Program Design," "Thinking in PostScript"
This page recommends writing books directly in Postscript for easy deployment. They provide TINYDICT CODES, a set of Postscript commands that may be used to mark up documents in a fashion not entirely unlike HTML, RTF, or TeX, to provide material that may directly be submitted to a Postscript printer for printing. They offer for sale a number of "Books on Demand" that were written in Postscript that thereby may easily be printed off and sold. This includes Practical PostScript, a book on how to do more sophisticated things in Postscript.
PS-HTTPD - Web Server implemented in PostScript
Believe it or not, there are Debian packages for this!
QuikScript is a portable typesetting system, written in PostScript. It enables documents to be prepared on any type of hardware, using visible layout marks to control the appearance of the output, and produce output on a PostScript printer by despatching Qs and the document file to the device. No processing is performed by the host hardware; all processing is done within the printer.
Ghostscript is a featureful emulator of the PostScript page description language originally created by Adobe.
Ghostscript is maintained by Aladdin Systems; it takes two forms:
Aladdin Ghostscript
This is the "commercial" version of Ghostscript. It is freely redistributable for personal use; commercial use requires that it be paid for. Source code is available...
GNU Ghostscript
After 18 months, "Aladdin" releases revert to the GNU CopyLeft license, and are thus free for many purposes.
It runs under many operating systems, and handles translation of Postscript and Adobe's "PDF" format into the printer control languages for a wide variety of printers.
Here are some useful links concerning the care and feeding of Ghostscript:
An open letter to the Ghostscript development community
It appears that the prolific L. Peter Deutsch may be retiring;
Raph Levien <raph@artofcode.com> is to be the new maintainer of
Ghostscript.
It is fairly likely that Ghostscript will revert to a straight GPL license (with simultaneous parallel licensing under the Aladdin license) to encourage greater public participation in changes. Raph also suggests that he has a vision to see greater integration of Gnome and GTK components with Ghostscript to encourage its direct use in GUI applications (ala DPS ).