Page Description Languages: Development, Implementation and Standardization

Advances in laser technology have facilitated the development of printers which accept input in the form of pages rather than the lines characteristic of impact printers. Concurrently, page description languages (PDLs) have been designed to facilitate the integration of complex text and graphics for printing. PDLs are described in a variety of ways and the paper starts with a rationalization of these viewpoints. It then traces the development of PDLs, describes their main characteristics, and looks at their relationship with laser printers. A survey of current implementations is then followed by an analysis of the relationship of these languages to other schemes for the description of printed images. Finally, the paper considers the requirements for a PDL standard.