What is PS2 format?

PS2 (PostScript Level 2 File)

PostScript is the page description language Adobe introduced in 1984, and for two decades it was how computers talked to laser printers: a PostScript file is a small program that tells the printer exactly how to draw each page. Level II arrived in 1991 and added what the first version lacked — built-in compression for images, device-independent colour, and more efficient handling of fonts and large bitmaps — which is why so much printing equipment settled on it.

Most office printing has since moved to PDF, but PostScript Level II has not gone away. Older laser printers, print servers, RIPs in print shops and plenty of industrial and label printers still accept it natively, and some accept nothing else. Writing a file as Level II rather than a newer level is the cautious choice when you do not know exactly what the device on the other end supports.

On this site PS2 is an output format, produced with ImageMagick. Each page or image is placed in the PostScript as compressed raster data, so what reaches the printer is a precise picture of the page: it prints exactly as rendered, but text in it cannot be searched or copied back out. A source with several pages comes back as a ZIP holding one PS2 file per page.

A note on the name. The .ps2 extension is not a standard PostScript extension, and the same letters are used informally for PlayStation 2 material, which is unrelated. If a printer or a print dialog will only pick up .ps files, renaming the file to .ps is all it takes; the content is ordinary PostScript.

What programs can open PS2 format?

  • Ghostscript
  • GSview
  • Okular
  • GNOME Document Viewer (Evince)
  • Adobe Acrobat Distiller
  • PostScript laser printers

Use cases for PS2 format?

  • Printing to older PostScript laser printers
  • Sending pages to print servers and RIPs
  • Industrial and label printers that accept PostScript
  • Legacy publishing and prepress workflows
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