by Mark Gavin
The Adobe PDF Reference is similar to the Adobe Postscript Language Reference; in that they can both be compared to a dictionary. A dictionary is a document which contains all of the words that can be used in a language; but, it doesn’t teach you how to combine those words into a good, well structured book.
PDF is based on Postscript. The documentation for Postscript was released as a set of three volumes.
Postscript Language Reference – Red Book
PostScript Language Program Design – Green Book
PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook – Blue Book
PostScript(R) Language Reference (3rd Edition)
Adobe Systems Inc.
PostScript(R) Language Program Design
Adobe Systems Inc.
PostScript(R) Language Tutorial and Cookbook
Adobe Systems Inc.
These documents are typically referred to by the color name; because, the covers of the books are actually Red, Green and Blue.
The PDF Reference is similar to the Postscript Red Book. Unlike Postscript; Adobe has not released a PDF Blue Book or a PDF Green Book to help teach developers how to construct well formed PDF files.
So why is Postscript important to PDF? Much of PDF is built on top of Postscript; and, since the Blue Book and the Green Book do not exist for PDF; reading and understanding the Postscript documentation is the next best information source available to PDF developers.
The above links can be found on a web site for the “Collider Detector at Fermilab“. The lab has an excellent page on Postscript.