PostScript versus PDF as an output format

Posted by Brecht Machiels on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Brecht Machiels
Published on 2011-01-06T19:41:57Z Indexed on 2011/01/07 14:53 UTC
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I'm currently writing a typesetting application and I'm using PSG as the backend for producing postscript files. I'm now wondering whether that choice makes sense. It seems the ReportLab Toolkit offers all the features PSG offers, and more. ReportLab outputs PDF however.

Advantages PDF offers:

transparancy
better support for character encodings (Unicode, for example)
ability to embed TrueType and even OpenType fonts
hyperlinks and bookmarks

Is there any reason to use Postscript instead of directly outputting to PDF? While Postscript is a full programming language as opposed to PDF, as a basic output format for documents, that doesn't seem to offer any advantage. I assume a PDF can be readily converted to PostScript for printing?

Some useful links:

Wikipedia: PDF
Adobe: PostScript vs. PDF

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