What Is a Page Description Language?

The page description language was born with the development of the electronic publishing industry. Its main function is to describe the text, graphics and images on the page. ^[1]

Page description language has been rapidly developed and widely used since its birth in the 1980s. Page description languages are mainly Adobe System's PostScript, Xerox's Interpress, Image's DDL, and HP's

(1) Arbitrary shapes can be formed by straight lines, arcs, and cubic curves. These shapes can intersect themselves and can include holes and discontinuities.

(2) Allows to draw arbitrary contours with arbitrary widths: you can use any graphic contour as a trim for other graphics.

(3) Text is also treated as a special graphic in PostScript language. Any element on this page layout, including graphics, images or text, can be effectively represented in PostScript. Therefore, using PostScript language, graphics, images, and text can be processed on the same machine and output at the same time.

(4) Allow images with arbitrary resolution and various dynamic ranges.

(5) Various coordinate transformations can be performed, including translation, reduction, enlargement, rotation, mapping, tilt, and so on. ^[2]