Display PostScript
on-screen display system
Display PostScript (or DPS) is a 2D graphics engine system for computers that uses the PostScript (PS) imaging model and language to generate on-screen graphics. PS was originally developed for computer printing, to which DPS adds a number of features intended to ease working with bitmapped displays and improve performance of some common tasks.
Early versions of PostScript display systems were developed at Adobe Systems. During development of the NeXT computers, NeXT and Adobe collaborated to produce the official DPS system, which was released in 1987. NeXT used DPS throughout its history, while versions from Adobe were popular on Unix workstations for a time during the 1980s and 1990s.
Design
The original PostScript was written for printing, with the model being that only one document could be printed at one time, and that the document was broken into logical sections approximating a page. For this reason, the underlying model of PS was based on a stack machine similar to the Forth programming language, which reduced the complexity of the code on the printer and the amount of memory needed to store individual graphics. The system would gather up instructions until the showpage command was issued, at which time all the instructions received since the last showpage or the start of the session were performed and the memory used by those instructions could then be released.
In contrast, a display engine works in a very different environment. There is no analog of a showpage that will eventually allow queued instructions to be performed, generally any drawing is expected to take place immediately.
“Display PostScript” enters the record as on-screen display system. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Display, PostScript and on-screen can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1229214. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Display PostScript” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.