Recommended books about postscript

PDF--to most of the world it stands for that rather tiresome format used for documents downloaded from the web. Slow to load and slower to print, hopelessly unsearchable, and all but impossible to cut and paste from, the Portable Document Format doesn't inspire much affection in the average user. But PDFs done right is another story. Those who know the ins and outs of this format know that it can be much more than electronic paper. Flexible, compact, interactive, and even searchable, PDF is the ideal way to present content across multiple platforms.

PDF Hacks unveils the true promise of Portable Document Format, going way beyond the usual PDF as paged output mechanism. PDF expert Sid Steward draws from his years of analyzing, extending, authoring, and embellishing PDF documents to present 100 clever hacks--tools, tips, quick-and-dirty or not-so-obvious solutions to common problems.

PDF Hacks will show you how to create PDF documents that are far more powerful than simple representations of paper pages. The hacks in the book cover the full range of PDF functionality, from the simple to the more complex, including generating, manipulating, annotating, and consuming PDF information. You'll learn how to manage content in PDF, navigate it, and reuse it as necessary. Far more than another guide to Adobe Acrobat, the book covers a variety of readily available tools for generating, deploying, and editing PDF.

The little-known tips and tricks in this book are ideal for anyone who works with PDF on a regular basis, including web developers, pre-press users, forms creators, and those who generate PDF for distribution. Whether you want to fine-tune and debug your existing PDF documents or explore the full potential the format offers, PDF Hacks will turn you into a PDF power user.

This book is a god-send for those of us who have to struggle with the often frustrating world of PDF documents on our computers. I was completely confused until I dug into this manual, which is relatively easy for a novice to understand. It has been a great help to me in find answers to problems I had with using PDF on a daily basis. I would highly recommend it.

There are several categories of hack in this book; two of them are "saving money" (finding ways to work with PDF's outside of Acrobat) and PDF in web design--using CGI scripting to serve up individual pages that have search text for example. A third type of hack are some old-school tricks that help make your PDF's more widely compatible. Good stuff, not crucial unless you happen to need it.

The title is completely misleading.
I purchased this book and software from Broderbund, after reading the reviews posted here at Amazon, believing the book and software would help me covert PDF files that I could not Save or print in its orginal format into ones I could.
I can say for sure,in my opinion, the other reviews of this book led me down the "fools primrose path."
Perhaps I should have read the reviews more carefully.
Of course the fault is entirely mine.

This is a very comprehensive solutions catalog on all kinds of PDF related issues. Each trick is described with step-by-step instructions and contains pointers to relevant resources. The chapter listing categorizes the hacks - Consuming PDF, Managing a Collection, Authoring and Self-Publishing, Creating PDF and Other Editions, Manipulating PDF files, Dynamic PDF, Scripting and Programming Acrobat.

I embrace the beauty of PDF as an end user and applications developer, but do not use Adobe Acrobat. Many of the tricks mentioned in the book is about this product. A problem is that the TOC does not tell whether or not a trick is Adobe Acrobat specific. Some of the hacks are like sections extracted from an advanced Adobe Acrobat user guide. As this is not obvious from the TOC, the content of the hack can be quite different from what I expected.

Despite this problem, the book is still a very useful one-stop resource about PDF. I will recommend this book to all who need to use or work with PDF.

With PDF files everywhere from web sites to help files, sooner or later you will run into a situation where you need to do something to a PDF file. For me the first time I realized I needed to do something I could not was when I needed to take one and convert it to a Word format so I could quickly outline the high points to study for a certification exam. After several hours I finally got it into a text file thanks to a web site that did the conversion. But even then I lost the tables, illustrations, etc. How to do that is one of the hacks included in this book. I wish it were printed a few years ago because it would have made my life easier.

After testing that hack I browsed through the book and kept finding myself asking "You can do that with a PDF file?" There are a lot of good tips in this book from making Acrobat startup faster, to converting PDF files, to automatic timed scrolling for easy reading, to creating a PDF using Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Perl, HTML, PHP, and Java. With page after page of coding, this is a tremendously useful book for anyone who wants to create or edit PDF files or change the way Acrobat works with files. PDF Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools is very highly recommended and will be put on my shelf reserved for books I want to be able to access quickly.

The LATEX typesetting system remains a popular choice for typesetting a wide variety of documents, from papers, journal articles, and presentations, to books--especially those that include technical text or demand high-quality composition. This book is the most comprehensive guide to making illustrations in LATEX documents, and it has been completely revised and expanded to include the latest developments in LATEX graphics. The authors describe the most widely used packages and provide hundreds of solutions to the most commonly encountered LATEX illustration problems.

This book will show you how to

• Incorporate graphics files into a LATEX document
• Program technical diagrams using several languages, including METAPOST, PSTricks, and XY-pic
• Use color in your LATEX projects, including presentations
• Create special-purpose graphics, such as high-qualitymusic scores and games diagrams
• Produce complex graphics for a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines

New to this edition:

• Updated and expanded coverage of the PSTricks and METAPOST languages
• Detailed explanations of major new packages for graphing and 3-D figures
• Comprehensive description of the xcolor package
• Making presentations with the beamer class
• The latest versions of gaming and scientific packages

There are more than 1100 fully tested examples that illustrate the text and solve graphical problems and tasks--all ready to run!

All the packages and examples featured in this book are freely downloadable from the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN).

The LATEX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, is more than ever an indispensable reference for anyone wishing to incorporate graphics into LATEX. As befits the subject, the book has been typeset with LATEX in a two-color design.

This book together with "The LaTex Companion" represents the state of the art of any manuals for LaTeX. The book is well written and it is comprehensible even to beginners . It shows all the major feature of the most common graphics packages. The most important thing is the all the packages are free available from [...] .
A really good guide for who is interested in producing high quality document and wants to write once and export in many formats.
It's a pity that there is no cd-rom media included.

Like The LaTeX Companion (Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting), "The LaTeX Graphics Companion" is loaded with valuable information from beginning to end (925 pages in total). This time, the focus of the book is on the various graphics packages that are available in LaTeX including:
*Metafont, Metapost and Metaobj;
*PSTricks (including pst-plot, pst-node, pst-tree, pst-fill, pst-3d and pst-3dplot);
*XY-pic;
*MusiXTeX (which is used for preparing music scores)
*Packages for typesetting science, technology and medicine formulae and diagrams; and
*Packages for typesetting games (influding chess, cards, etc).

Each package is described thoroughly, through the use of numerous examples and I doubt there is a more detailed manual to these packages available anywhere. However, be aware that this book assumes a working knowledge of LaTeX (if you haven't already purchased it, I recommend you buy "The LaTeX Companion" as well as this book). Also, I found that I could not obtain some of the graphics packages described in this book and I found that when I started learning PSTricks, I needed to look at some online tutorials as well as this book, in order to learn the basics. Goosens et al. are not good at describing things to absolute beginners, but are good once you get beyond that.

The second edition of the LaTeX Graphics Companion, along the second edition of the LaTeX Companion, are essential resources for LaTeX users. When one first starts using LaTeX, you need one of the commercial books or free on-line books that provide an introduction and overview of LaTeX. Right after that you need the nearly comprehensive Companion books, written by the on-going developers and maintainers of LaTeX.

This practical introduction to the techniques needed to produce high-quality mathematical illustrations is suitable for anyone with basic knowledge of coordinate geometry. Bill Casselman combines a completely self-contained step-by-step introduction to the graphics programming language PostScript with an analysis of the requirements of good mathematical illustrations. The many small simple graphics projects can also be used in courses in geometry, graphics, or general mathematics. Code for many of the illustrations is included, and can be downloaded from the book's web site: www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manualMathematicians; scientists, engineers, and even graphic designers seeking help in creating technical illustrations need look no further.

Presents a complete and authoritative reference manual for the PostScript language. Explains the fundamentals of the PostScript language, graphics, fonts, device control, and rendering. Softcover. DLC: PostScript (Computer program language).

Programmers who specialize in PostScript, the page-description language, now have a newly updated reference guide for LanguageLevel 3. PostScript�� Language Reference starts off with a bit of history on the language and an overview of the new version. It goes on to cover basic topics such as raster output devices, scan conversion, and page-description languages in general.

PostScript�� Language Reference provides an overview of how to use the PostScript interpreter and understand the ideal structure of PostScript page descriptions. The book covers the heart of the language, including syntax, data types and objects, stacks, execution, basic operators, memory management, file input/output (I/O), functions, errors, and filtered-files and binary-encoding details. Subsequent chapters cover graphics, fonts, device control, rendering, and operators.

The appendices include a LanguageLevel feature summary, implementation limits, interpreter parameters, compatibility issues, character sets, encoding vectors, system-name encodings, and operator-usage guidelines. There's also a bibliography with additional reading recommendations. --Kathleen Caster

If you are going to be working with PostScript you will need this book (widely refered to as the "Red Book.")It is indeed THE reference for PostScript, but the organizational aspects of the book itself are a bit confusing until you understand some PostScript fundementals and have a grasp for some oddball "Adobeisms."In addition to this book I've always made a habit of leveraging the "suppliments" released for each version of an interpreter.For example, PostScript level 2 actually consists of several versions of level 2 interpreter (2011, 2015, etc) all of which have associated supplements describing specific features supported (or not.) The supplements are available for download from Adobe's developer side of their web site (they are often far smaller than the Red Book, and absolutely indespensible.)Additionally, each manufacturer who OEMs an Adobe interpreter sometimes release documentation pertaining to which specific features within an interpreter version are supported, and how. For example, companies often develop specialized applications built upon frameworks provided by Adobe in an interpreter version. Understanding the customized PostScript commands for these applications enables you to take full advantage of them. Either way, buy the book. Don't waste your time downloading it. Sure, that's "tree friendly" but we all know it will end up getting printed anyway.

If you're like me and just need to do a little bit with the language, you will need this book but you might want to consider downloading it directly from Adobe. They have it, in its entirety, in pdf format. (Why not postscript?!) On the otherhand, if you are going to be using this language alot, you will probably just want to buy the book seeing how an 897 page pdf is a bit unweildy.

This manual - the 'Red Book' - is absolutely necessary for programming in PostScript. It is the only complete reference guide to the language, and is so well-organized and thorough that no one else even bothers to publish a complete third-party guide. Many other books have been published on PostScript - and many are excellent - but they are books you will buy in addition to, rather than instead of, this manual. We can only wish that other software manuals were as well-written.

If you want to program in PostScript, you must have this manual. However, you need the newer version, since this second edition only covers version 2 of the PostScript language. The third edition covers version 3, and you can find it for sale here on Amazon using ISBN 0-201-37922-8.

Clear, easy to understand and complete. Very good

In spite of Parkinson's Disease, he has committed his life with his wife, to direct fundraising necessary for the University of Arizona's Neuroscience Research at the top of their list.

Imagine this: you are tasked to be responsible for understanding the PostScript language. Perhaps because you need to troubleshoot printing issues, or because you want to write specialized drivers for a custom system. Where to start?Many recommend that you can get these sorts of resources on the web for free. That's is true, but I prefer to take into account the true cost of doing so. I can't speak for you, but my time is worth more than trying to save a few bucks downloading and printing my own version.Most tasked with understanding PostScript are typically given the monolithic PostScript Language Reference Manual and perhaps a supplement. If you lack exposure to PostScript, this is a huge and perhaps impossible leap towards PostScript proficiency. This book goes a long way towards helping the reader quickly understand the basic foundation of PostScript. The book itself is short, small, and easy to read. In fact, its helpful to imagine it as a "PostScript sing a long."Most higher end PostScript printers support network socket connections directly to the PostScript interpreter, meaning that you can connect and actually work directly with the PostScript monster. Write me and ask if you want to know how.I found it helpful to simply sit by a computer with this book, read some pages, then duplicate the programs the book illustrates. If your printer supports the socket connections, great. Connect and enter the code directly. Try creating syntatic errors and watch how the PostScript interpreter responds. Understanding these errors goes a long way towards effectively troubleshooting PostScript.Alternately, you can enter the PostScript code into files, and download them to the printer. Most printers support a verbose debug mode, enabling you to see why the PostScript programs were rejected by the interpreter. This too is rather helpful, educationally and practically.If you need to learn PostScript, and lack any exposure, get this book. But it will leave you in PostScript first grade...more resources listed in my other reviews pertaining to PostScript.

This book is a great start to postscript programming, but it leaves out some very important details. I found that if you wanted to include images into your postscript file this book is no help at all. Most of the examples in the book you can find on the web, and if you dig a little you will find this entire book in pdf format on the web. My recommendation is to not spend the money.

This books gives very good start for the programmer who want to learn postscript.

This book is good for beginner who are writting some basic program. May not be good for advance programming.

Together at last, in these two volumes, are over 4,000 computer fonts for all users of type today--graphic designers, typesetters, type manufacturers and students. This encyclopedia of typefaces presents a comprehensive visual identification, specification and comparison guide for the thousands of computer/electronic fonts now available. Volume 1 includes Serif and Scripts typefaces. Volume 2 contains Sans Serif, Design, Outline, and Shadow typefaces.

This handy reference describes techniques and tricks needed to illustrate LaTeX documents, and answers common user questions about graphics and PostScript fonts. It provides the first full description of the standard LaTeX color and graphics packages, and shows how you can combine TeX and PostScript capabilities to produce beautifully illustrated pages. Following the successful format of The LaTeX Companion, this new book is an invaluable LaTeX resource for people incorporating pictures into text.

You will learn how to: incorporate graphic files into a LaTeX document, program technical diagrams using several differant languages, produce color pictures, achieve special effects with fragments of embedded PostScript, and make high-quality music scores and games diagrams.

You will find detailed descriptions of: important packages like Xy-pic, PSTricks, and METAPOST; the standard LaTeX color and graphics packages; PostScript fonts and how to use them in LaTeX; the dvips dvi to PostScript driver; and Ghostscript, the free interpreter that lets you view or print PostScript files even if you do not have a PostScript printer.

The authors examine a number of packages that extend or modify LaTeX's basic illustration features, and present hundreds of examples of useful solutions to graphics and font problems. In addition to packages for general drawing, the book also presents specific tools for mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers, and people interested in games and music typesetting.

All the packages and programs described in this book are freely available in public software archives, and the source code for all examples has been placed on CTAN, the TeX archives (details on page 497).

Need to do charts or graphics using latex? Then this is the book for you. It's the most advanced and complete book on Latex graphics that I've seen. If you would like to implement a reporting system that can draw charts using latex then this book is a must. Though I've not used latex in a while, I do remember that this one is not for the faint of heart. I do put it into the one of "must have" latex books.

Many times in this book I've seen exactly what I want to do, but the LaTeX code is not always shown. I use this book as a hint to what can be done, and then I search on the web for LaTeX examples. I am fairly disappointed, and often find myself more frustrated after reading a section than I was before.As an example (for those of you who have the book), Figure 4.1 is referenced as an example of how to use \multido, but the book does not have (or I could not find) the corresponding LaTeX.

I would have to hazard a guess that this is probably the most advanced LaTeX book on the market. It is lots of fun to look at with its many esoteric uses of LaTeX--typesetting bridge or chess game diagrams, music notation, optical illusions--in other words, stuff that I wish had enough time to learn but probably never will. However, I do find myself looking at this book more than I initially imagined because it is quite useful on subjects such as fonts and the "dvips" program. For these areas, you'll definitely find things to learn and use even if you aren't ever going to typeset Mozart's lost symphony or fiddle with Encapsulated Post-Script code at the primitive command level.

Nicely crafted guidebook to the graphics and fonts. PSTricks, color, chess, chemistry and music - helps you to typeset all of it, and more. My only complain is that the chapter on fonts is vague at places - because the book tries to be so encyclopedic, I guess

If you use LaTeX and are serious about including graphics in your documents, then this is the book to read. I've never seen a more complete and readable explanation of using graphics with LaTeX. However, I don't recommend that raw beginners use this book. You really need some knowledge of LaTeX to understand what's going on. If you're an advanced user, THE LATEX GRAPHICS COMPANION is indispensible.

A complete reference to the file format for Adobe Acrobat products. It contains a detailed description of the file format and provides invaluable tips and techniques showing how to optimize programming.

While in structure and content up to par with other Adobe books, this book should be taken off the Amazon shelves! It is completely out of date, and you can download the newest version of the PDF specification from the Adobe web site -- free of charge!

Oriented toward graphic artists and other nonprogrammers, this book teaches the powerful PostScript laser printer language using a unique visual feedback approach. Building from simple examples, the text extends to complex special effects.

This book is useful to people employed or interested in graphics, desktop design, document engineering, or programming. It will help you better understand any of these topics. PostScript, developed by Adobe, is the language "under the hood" of PDFs, many layout programs, and a category of printers. It's a full-fledged programming language that's pretty much dedicated to graphics, letting you get at the elements of lines, shapes, shading, and color. And it is becoming even more relevant. Before a document can be made into a PDF, traditionally it has had to be converted into postscript (.ps), and even Microsoft has given a little territory in that direction by their attempts to include automatic creation of PDFs in Office 2007.

PostScript is relatively easy to learn and can also diversify your understanding of programming concepts. Unlike varieties of C or Java, PostScript is a "reverse Polish notation" language, which means that the parameters are stated prior to the relevant commands. Like "144 144 lineto" will draw a line to the coordinates listed. It is also "stack-oriented," so I find that it's a little easier to visualize what is happening as I work through the code. Because it's so graphics-directed, PostScript obviously lends itself to the "visual approach." Most of the basic commands resemble actual everyday words, so you can learn rapidly before you even know you are programming. In other words, you don't have to be a programmer or script writer to learn PostScript.

And this particular book makes learning PostScript basics easy. It gives code on one page and then shows what happens next to it. It starts with the basics of positioning on the page, and then adds commands that extend the complexity and richness of the illustrations. It also does a good job introducing the programming concepts such as RPN and stack arithmetic. Over the years, PostScript has evolved into a more complex language, incorporating numerous commands that extend the language and concatenate groups of simpler commands (such as a command to draw a box rather than 4 commands to draw the sides). But the book sticks with the basics, and slowly extends your knowledge and skills. Like other programming languages, PostScript includes techniques like recursion, definitions of variables, definitions of complex tasks, mathematics, etc. PostScript is not object-oriented.

As a graphics description programming language, PostScript needs some type of compiler for you to see what your code actually draws. This traditionally involves an accompanying program called "ghostscript" that allows the user to see the results in nearly real time. I personally don't care much for ghostscript and often used Adobe Distiller and created PDFs to see the results. Those who don't have Distiller can install and use ghostscript, and that is covered in the book.

Since PostScript is a relatively mature technology, there are a lot of older books available, as well as a plethora of web sites and a couple discussion groups. Adobe has some excellent books that can be downloaded for free. They all have something to contribute, but I found this book to be the best of the lot, the easiest to read, and generally the most useful. Improvements? Well, occasionally the author works a new term into the code and doesn't really explain it. That happens more frequently later in the book, and by then you can sort of guess what the term accomplishes. At a certain point, things like this are probably unavoidable, since it's a very rich and complex language, and you can't be treated like a "dummy" all the time. I would also like to see more discussion about PDFs and how to work my written code into existing PDFs, but this book - like many of them - was written more for the era of the PostScript printer than the current period where PDFs are so prominent.

I bought this book in 1994 when I had absolutely no clue about programming. It was a real eye-opener, and to this day it's my reference bible with regard to PostScript. Highly recommended.

Simple, concise, yet by no means limited. I learned essentially all the postscript that I needed to know for my job in about 3 hours reading this book. Excellent examples, easy to follow, what could more could you ask for?

This is a wonderful starting point for learning postscript. It takes you step by step through a very complex topic in a way that is easy to understand as well as offering opportunities to practice what you are learning. I recommend it highly!

This book offers clear, simple examples and covers the basic Postscript concepts in a way that makes it easy to apply them to real-life situations.I borrowed this book froma friend, and I have GOT to add it to my library -- a must-have!