What Is a PostScript Printer Driver?
PostScript printer drivers are software programs built on the PostScript language that allowed for the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s. PostScript drove early consumer laser printers and dominated the market through the '90s. Less in use today because of the advent of inkjet printers, PostScript has been primarily replaced by the PDF, another creation of Adobe.
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Printer Drivers
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The purpose of a printer driver is to allow applications to send print jobs to a printer without having to know the full specifications of the printer. Without printer drivers, every piece of software with print capability would need to be able to translate its print jobs for every printer available or, at least, every printer the programmers chose to include. Printer drivers are a piece of software that encompass the specifications of a particular printer or set of printers and are typically packaged with the printer or available for download via the Internet.
PostScript Printer Drivers
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PostScript, originally introduced in 1982, provides a way to translate computer files from desktop publishing software to the printer's interpreter. PostScript allowed a broader usage of laser printers, which unlike earlier printers allowed for the use of text and graphics on the same page. PostScript is what is called a Page Description Language. Unlike previous printer control languages, PostScript is a complete programming language unto itself. PostScript offers the advantage of being device-independent, because it can be used for multiple devices and is not tied to a particular device.
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Before PostScript
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Before the advent of PostScript, there were two common iterations of printer that it helped replace. The first was ASCII based, which relied heavily on a particular set of available characters to produce documents. This was supplanted by the dot-matrix printer, which allowed much more flexibility in printing and added more font availability. Dot-matrix also allowed for some graphics printing, as it created documents by printing text or graphics as small dots aligned on the page. Both of these were limited formats that didn't offer the sort of versatility that would come with the advent of PostScript.
History of PostScript
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PostScript has its origins in the team that developed Xerox's InterPress printing language. Members of that team, John Warnock and Chuck Geschenke, formed Adobe in 1982 and released PostScript in 1984. They developed PostScript to become the driver for the Apple LaserWriter, and this helped to spark Desktop Publishing in the 1980s. PostScript came to dominate the translation of data from computer to printer through the 1990s until it was supplanted by Adobe's own Portable Document File as a preferred format for printing. PostScript is used less frequently now than it had been because of the increased use of inkjet printers, which don't use PostScript drivers.
PDF
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Portable Document File (PDF), also from Adobe, has replaced its predecessor as a preferred printing tool. The PDF was built on the PostScript language but contains much more information about the page or pages it describes. PDFs are much more versatile files, which can print as shown on-screen or be used as documents themselves. Documents that can contain movies or secure data allow for form entry and more.
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