PostScript is the page description language 📝Adobe released in 1984 that tells a printer or imagesetter exactly how text, curves, and images should appear on a page. It was the company's first product and the reason Adobe exists.
PostScript treats a page as a small program rather than a fixed grid of dots, which let type and graphics render at the full resolution of any device — from an office laser printer to a professional imagesetter. That device independence was the breakthrough. When Apple licensed PostScript for the 1985 LaserWriter and paired it with page-layout software, professional typography moved onto the desktop for the first time, igniting the desktop publishing revolution and establishing the young company almost overnight.
Founders 📝John Warnock and 📝Charles Geschke built PostScript after leaving Xerox PARC, where an earlier printing language, Interpress, had gone uncommercialized. The language went on to seed 📝PDF, the Portable Document Format, and while modern document workflows now run on it, PostScript remains a foundation of digital printing and a defining moment in publishing history.
PostScript was our founding bet: that a page should be described, not just printed. It is the seed everything else grew from — our tools, our formats, and our belief that precise craft belongs in everyone's hands.