Document Structuring Conventions

Article summary

Document Structuring Conventions (DSC) is a set of standards for PostScript, based on the use of comments, that specifies a way to structure a PostScript file and a way to expose that structure in a machine-readable way. A PostScript file that conforms to DSC is called a conforming document. The need for a structuring convention arises since PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language. There is thus no guaranteed method — short of actually printing the document — to do things like determining how many pages long a given document is or how large a given page is, or how to skip to a particular page. The addition of structure, with DSC comments exposing that structure, helps provide a way for, e.g., an intelligent print spooler to have the ability to rearrange the pages for printing, or for a page layout program to find the bounding box of a PostScript file used as a graphic image. Collectively, any such program that takes PostScript files as input data is called a document manager. In order for a PostScript print file to properly distill to PDF using Adobe tools, it should conform to basic DSC standards. Some DSC comments serve a second function, specifying a way to tell the document manager to do certain things, like inserting a font or other PostScript code (collectively called resources) into the file.…

Key claims

1. release date: 1992-09-25 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. The record states that the release date is "1992-09-25". What evidence would count against this claim?
3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

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