What do you do if you are a small company launching a technically obscure product against formidable competition?

You take a page out of the Microsoft Corp. playbook and declare your product a standard the day you announce it.

Which is exactly what Adobe Systems Inc. has done in announcing Display PostScript (DPS), an extension to its page-description language for writing graphics to a screen instead of to a printer.

DPS was first announced in September 1987 by Adobe and NeXT Inc., who jointly developed the graphics-imaging software. Digital Equipment Corp. signed on to incorporate DPS in its DEC Windows product in January of this year. But things didn’t really start heating up until the NeXT computer was announced in October.

DPS, as demonstrated in the NextStep interface, coupled with the announcement of IBM’s licensing of DPS for its AIX Unix operating system, suddenly made DPS a hot technology and Adobe a company to watch.

DPS is an implementation of the PostScript language for interactive graphics displays. NextStep will not be shipped until sometime next year, and it is unclear how IBM and Digital will implement DPS on their Unix …