Chapter 1 provides an overview of the PostScript language and a lightning tour of its main features.

Here's a partial list of topics in Chapter 1:

Chapter 2 concentrates on two basic notions of PostScript—constructing paths and painting them. This chapter focuses on lines and rectangles, with emphasis on the PostScript painting model. You will read about setting the current point, drawing lines, and drawing rectangles with PostScript Level Two and Display PostScript rectangle operators.

Additionally, this chapter covers parameters of the graphics state that you can change to affect the appearance of lines—widths, joins, caps, and dashed line styles, among others.

One of the major strengths of PostScript is its close integration of graphical objects with text—a smooth mix of text and graphics has been an elusive goal of many graphics systems, composition systems, and page description languages.

Chapter 3 focuses on the PostScript features for selecting fonts and displaying strings of text in the selected fonts. This chapter also focuses on showing text strings using composite fonts, and obtaining the precise widths of strings in different fonts.

An in-depth examination of the role that the CTM (Current Transformation Matrix) plays in controlling the manner in which PostScript images are displayed. Chapter 4 covers the theme of how a PostScript program transforms between user space and device space.

User space, also known as the user coordinate system, is an ideal coordinate system that is, for all practical purposes, an infinite plane on which you can move around with as fine a precision as you need.

Device space, on the other hand, may not be so cooperative. It's usually limited in size, and the resolution of devices differs. In addition to being a less-than-ideal infinite plane, device space may be oriented differently from user space and possibly be at a different scale factor than user space. This chapter describes how to manipulate the transformations between ideal PostScript user space and the device spaces of the real world.

Chapter 5 is a grab bag of information about the PostScript language. You'll learn about PostScript stacks, dictionaries, procedures, PostScript operators, and Virtual Memory, to mention just a few.

Chapter 6 continues with the exposition of line widths and also covers other aspects of line styles such as line joins, line caps, miter limits, and dashed line styles. What happens to the width of a line in a non-uniformly scaled coordinate system is not immediately obvious. As it happens, line widths get scaled along with everything else—the PostScript transformation model is quite consistent.

PostScript would be boring if you could draw only straight lines and rectangles. To make PostScript interesting, you need to be able to draw arcs, circles, ellipses, and other nice curvy shapes. The first part of Chapter 7 discusses PostScript operators for drawing arcs of circles. The second part discusses PostScript operators for drawing Bezier curves.

In addition to stroking or filling a path, you can also use a path to clip. The best way to think of a clipping region is as a stencil through which images are poured. images poured inside the clipping area appear on the final output. images poured outside the clipping area disappear.

Where previous chapters concentrated on analytical graphics and text—pictures represented by PostScript programs consisting of lines and curves, Chapter 9 concentrates on images—pictures built from sampled data.

Sampled data is simply a pattern of bits, and a file of sampled data is often called a bitmap. Common sources of sampled bitmap data include scanned photographs and the output from paint programs.

Chapter 9 covers the basics of images, color images, Level Two Image Dictionaries, Image Masks, and a short section on Filters.

Chapter 10 leads you into another building block in the PostScript foundation—facilities to create or enhance fonts. It delves into issues of fonts, typefaces, and letterforms. Typefaces and letterforms have been an important aspect of visual communication for hundreds of years and continue to be so. Letterforms impart tone and style to a document. Traditionally, the letterforms of a typeface are gathered together into collections called fonts.

Chapter 10 covers the basics of creating Type 3 fonts, Level Two Composite Fonts, and a short section on Multiple Master Fonts.

Patterns were introduced in PostScript Level 2 as a part of the new PostScript graphics capabilities. Chapter 11 leads you through a new type of color, called a pattern color space. The chapter describes how to create patterns for use as a color.

Chapter 11 covers colored patterns where the color is supplied from within the PaintProc of the pattern dictionary, as well as uncolored patterns where the color of the pattern is supplied as part of the specification of the color space to the setcolorspace operator.

Forms were introduced in PostScript Level 2 as a part of the new PostScript graphics capabilities. Forms are descriptions of arbitrary graphics, text, and images that can be painted multiple times on each of several pages, or can be painted at several different locations on a single page.

Forms depart from the traditional PostScript approach of providing you with basic tools to place graphics and text on a page or on the screen. Rather, forms belong in the realm of advanced tools for a specialized job. Forms provide you with a simple and efficient means of reproducing the common skeletal framework of your image many times.

Color—it's a complicated subject, full of mystery and specialized jargon. Chapter 13 contains three distinct sections that attempt to unravel some of the complications of color technology.

After a brief overview of the color models supported by the PostScript language, the first section provides a detailed discussion of each color model and its related PostScript operators. Included in this discussion are CIE color specification and color separations.

The second section focuses on issues revolving around the use of color in PostScript programs. The third and final section discusses halftoning for both monochrome and color images.

There's another side to PostScript—practical issues you deal with every day in connection with real printing devices and real applications. Chapter 14 contains somewhat of a gallimaufry of issues that PostScript programmers and users alike should know about.

Here's a partial list of topics in Chapter 14: