Printing at the end of the 20th century

Printing has evolved considerably over the course of the 20th century, much more so than in the previous four centuries. Since the early 1980s, word processing has joined traditional typesetting: the same machines are used to typeset letters, magazines and newspapers.

The first PostScript printers saw the light of day with the start of the desktop publishing (DTP) explosion. PostScript accompanied and accentuated this phenomenon by offering a high-quality, scalable printing system, independent of the physical limitations of the printing medium.

PostScript took printing to the next level by standardizing a markup language, i.e. a coding system that mixes text to be printed with commands to control its appearance and where it appears. Before PostScript, professionals had to learn the tag language specific to each brand of photocomposer. What's...