Postscript

PostScript (PS) is a programming language designed for description of two-dimentional objects desigend for visual observation by humans, characterized in that, that, in order to avoid the use of the group operation (parenthesis), the command (operator), in general, appears after the operands. PostScript is standard format for presentation of illustrations at the electronic submission of figures for the publication is the scientific journals.

Vector representation of figures
Typically, the postscript uses the analytical description of figiure with simple objects (straight lines, circles and arcs of circles and ellipses, ploigons); similar representation is used also for letters. This allows the compact description of data and the strong (sometimes, orders of magintude) zooming-in, keeping the camera-ready quality of the figure.

Roster representation of data
The bitmap representation of data is also supported, although for the roster representation, the advantages of the postscript are not so obvious. The sintax of postscript allows to generate the simple images with few lines, for example, the code !PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-2.0 %%BoundingBox: 0 0 62 122 100 100 scale .1 .1 translate 4 4 1 [8 0 0 8 0 0] { } image .0 .6 translate 4 4 1 [8 0 0 8 0 0] { } image showpage %Trailer generates the figure shown at right. More complicated example can be found at

Use of postscript
Several manuals on the postscript are available online; they allows to use the postsctipt without any preliminary learning.

External sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript