On 08/30/2013 11:16 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
AFAIK, PostScript is a printer language, where a PDF is supposed to be a cross platform, software independent document format. And the web has nothing to do with it.
PostScript is an interpreted programming language, largely intended, of course, for page description. It runs, in principle, on anything, and there are interpreters for lots of platforms and different kinds of devices. PDF incorporates a subset of PostScript and adds font embedding. The biggest difference is that PDFs are structured by page, so that you could download one page and be able to display it. To display a single page of a PostScript file, by contrast, you have to have everything before it. That made PostScript unsuitable for the web, and PDF was, to a large extent, created to solve that problem.
On the other hand, PDF is not really as cross-platform as it claims to be. A single PDF can look very different on different devices, unless you make sure to embed all the fonts. This is one place that DVI has a significant advantage.
Richard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Technical_foundations
