PostScript (PS)

Postscript® is a powerful and widely used page description language developed and owned by Adobe. When you print a document on a postscript printer the document is first converted into this language and subsequently sent to the printer. Before being sent to the printer the converted document may be captured into a file in ps format. This file may be saved and distributed over the internet and can be viewed and printed at any location on different platforms.

A PostScript file may be saved with different options. The option optimize for portability - ADSC ensures the widest possible distribution.

PostScript files and font embeddings

Use only valid Type 1 or True Type fonts

We advise you to use only the standard PostScript fonts with Type 1 or True Type encoding. This can be assured by using the times (Type 1) or times new roman (True Type) fonts for the text of your paper. You may also need some other fonts, such as Courier or Courier new (for typeset programming code), or Symbol (for mathematics), but do not use any other fonts apart from the above ones. Please restrict the character set of your paper file to the ASCII or the ISO Latin-1 subset.

NOTE: Including non-standard fonts is one of the primary sources of poor performance. Please check carefully that your file does not contain any font which is not included in the set of allowed fonts for IFAC manuscripts.

SYSID 2003 home

Submission home

Deadlines

IPC Secretariat

Instructions for authors

LaTeX
Microsoft Word
Adobe FrameMaker
Other text processors

Copyright conditions

PS FAQ's

Generating PostScript files

Generating PostScript files by printing

It is quite simple to create a postscript file if you have a postscript printer installed on your Windows PC. The procedure works for MS Word documents and documents created in other Windows applications. If you do not have a postscript printer installed, then install one first:
  • Open your document in MS Word or any other Windows application
  • Select the File/Print menu item.
  • Select the postscript printer from the list of printers. It does not matter if this printer is not connected to the PC or the network
  • Click on Properties and select the Postscript tab
  • Select the option Postscript (optimize for portability - ADSC)
  • Click OK to return to the Print menu
  • Check the box Print to file and click OK
  • When requested enter the file name and make sure to which folder the file will be written. Click OK.
  • Finally, change the file extension from prn to ps.

Generating PostScript files from LaTeX under Windows

The standard way to convert a LaTeX document to a PostScript file is to use the dvips command. This is normally part of TeX installations for PC such as MIKTeX.

On a Windows PC you may open the document in your dvi viewer (such as dviwin or yap), and print it to a postscript file. This procedure also works in TeX installations such as Scientific Workplace that do not support dvips.

Generating PostScript files from LaTeX under UNIX

The standard way to convert a LaTeX document to a postscript file under UNIX is to use dvips. Dvips converts a dvi file into a ps file. After having created your dvi file, named mypaper.dvi, say, simply type

dvips -o mypaper.ps mypaper on the command line. This creates a postscript file with the name mypaper.ps. A shorter version of the same command is

dvips mypaper -o but this may not work on all installations.

Viewing PostScript files

Postscript files may be viewed with Ghostview which is distributed with Ghostscript.

PostScript files and TeX

Documents converted from the TeX typesetting language into the Adobe PostScript language or Acrobat Portable Document format (PDF) files usually contain fixed-resolution bitmap fonts that do not print or display well on a variety of printer and computer screens. Please see the document

Creating quality Adobe PDF files from TeX with DVIPS, by Kendall Whitehouse

Good resolution of documents produced from LaTeX may also be achieved by using standard postscript fonts instead of Computer Modern fonts. The latter are resolution specific bitmaps embedded as PostScript Type 3 fonts. Please use PostScript Type 1 (resolution independent) fonts. An easy way to do this is to insert the following lines in the header section of your LaTeX file (i.e. before \begin{document}):

\usepackage{times,mathptmx}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{textcomp}

Alternatively, insert a command such as \usepackage{times} in the preamble of the LaTeX source file.
Updated June 2002.
Report problems to the webmaster