PostScript Books

There are a number of good books on PostScript. If you do much PostScript programming at all, I highly recommend that you get one of these print books.

PostScript Language Reference Manual: Third Edition

This book is put out by Adobe Systems Incorporated and is published by Addison Wesley. It is the reference manual and pretty much defines the language. The operator reference guide I have here pretty well follows Adobe's reference in this manual. Their reference is, however, far more detailed (and accurate). This book is known as the “Red and White Book.” Adobe also provides other books (including the “Blue” tutorial and cookbook). The PLRM's ISBN is: 0-201-37922-8

PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook

This book is also put out by Adobe and is published by Addison Wesley. (Are you starting to see a pattern here?) This is a very neat book on PostScript and gives a number of handy examples (two which come to mind are a set of routines to set text in a circle and a simple text formatter). This is the so-called blue book. The ISBN is 0-201-10179-3.

Learning PostScript: a Visual Approach

This book is a fine beginning text for PostScript. The book emphasizes PostScript's fantastic graphics abilities while illustrating basic language constructs. The language concepts are illustrated with graphic design examples, most of which you will be tempted to use in your own documents. The book also includes a number of interesting and useful utilities. Author: Ross Smith. Publisher: Peachpit Press. ISBN 0-938-151-12-6. I do not know if this book is still in print, but there are copies available on Amazon at the time I write this. You can probably find it elsewhere, too.