During your 'Net travels you may come across a few Postscript files. Ghostscript is a program that will help you read, render, and print these files on your Macintosh.
During your 'Net travels you may come across a few Postscript files. Ghostscript is a program that will help you read, render, and print these files on your Macintosh.
Postscript is a programing language. This language's primary purpose is to interpret commands and describe what gets put on a piece of paper. Once a page has been described, the result is intended to be sent to a printer for actual output. Since Postscript is pretty much a "universal" page description language, Postscript files (which may represent text or graphics), can be printed on just about any computing platform. They are also very difficult to edit by hand. Consequently, Postscript files, precursors to PDF files, are/were a good way to distributed "immutable" documents while preserving page layout.
For a long time, the problem with Postscript files was they had to be printed in order to be used. Then came Ghostscript. This program interprets Postscript commands and implements them in a window instead of a piece of paper. Thus you can read Postscript files without a printer.
To get the Macintosh version of GhostScript (MacGS Viewer) to work for you, you must first get the necessary files. Be forewarned. The distribution is large and comes in many parts. Read the documentation carefully. For people who are using non-PowerPC Macintoshes, you can get the distribution from the Tricks archive and everything is set up for you.
After getting the necessary files, make sure your WWW browser is set up to receive Postscript files. Make sure there is a MIME Type of application/postscript matching the file extensions .ai, .eps, and/or .ps. You may want to configure your browser to automatically launch the Ghostscript as well. All you have to do now is download the Postscript files and wait for them to be rendered by Ghostscript (MacGS Viewer). After they are rendered you can copy the text from the window (in the form of a picture), put the image into some other application, and then print. You will only be able to process one page at a time. If you want to simply print the downloaded Postscript file, then it is recommended you get your hands on BBEdit which comes with an extension just for this purpose.
MIME type: application/postscript
Filename extensions: .ai, .eps, .ps
Eric last edited this page on September 26, 1995. Please feel free to send comments.