In many ways, it is difficult to see what function this book is intended to serve. The jacket talks about “information on how text, graphics and images may be mixed at the PostScript level” and gives a list of some of the many applications covered. While this description is true to the contents of the book, it is one of the goals of such applications (and of Encapsulated PostScript) that users need not concern themselves with such details, and while the use of PostScript by a few of the applications (such as Adobe Illustrator) is described in some detail, others are merely mentioned. The entire description of Type Studio, for instance, reads “This is a PostScript font generator for the Ventura Publisher program.”
Another difficulty is with the structure of the book. English is clearly not the author’s first language, and although this is rarely apparent in his choice of words or phrases, his use of short simple sentences gives the book a staccato feel, more like notes than prose. The larger-scale structure is also unhelpful, with details of the principles of Encapsulated PostScript scattered among brief descriptions of the facilities provided by particular applications. A description of the operators being added to PostScript for color support, fax generation, and extended character sets is interrupted by a paragraph on slide-making applications.
The book is divided into 11 chapters:
PostScript--A Publishing Standard
Short Introduction to PostScript
Color Support
Mixing PostScript Files
The Construction of the SWITCH Logo
Illustrations on Mac and IBM PC
Constructing Your Own Characters
Digitizing Images with the Agfa Scanner
Learning the PostScript Language
Interpreter in the Printer or Computer
EPSF Specification by Adobe
An appendix discusses document structuring conventions. The choice of examples is also uneven, perhaps reflecting an earlier incarnation of the text as a users’ document in the author’s home university. A completely superfluous list of applications used at the University of Zürich is accompanied by an equally puzzling map of their metropolitan area network and a sidebar noting that “for practical reasons, a laser printer supplied with a magnetic card reader or a coin slot must be controlled by a single workstation,” which is not only irrelevant but untrue. Likewise, the inclusion of discussions of the use of PostScript from IBM VM/CMS systems sits uneasily with the general tenor, and indeed title, of the book. These passages lead me to suspect that the author delivered camera-ready copy to his publishers, which they were unwilling to edit. This approach is not to their or the author’s credit. The only two color plates in the book, added I assume at some expense, are wasted on the familiar three-circle color-mixing diagram and the word “PostScript” in four shades of red.
Although the book includes an unstructured introduction to programming in PostScript, it does not have enough information for those wishing to generate their own Encapsulated PostScript files, or for those wishing to debug unfortunate interactions between files generated by different applications. I presume that the purpose of the book is to be a guide to those using or considering PostScript applications, but the sketchy details on their use and that of the PostScript files they generate, combined with the pace of change in the PC marketplace, must severely limit its use.
