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The Postscript language reference manual is published by Addison Wesley for
Adobe.
It's available in most bookstores that carry technical/computer books.
Here are a couple excerpts from the reference about moveto and ashow. Roughly,
moveto moves you to a point where you can start drawing something, and ashow
draws the characters and adjusts it by the amount specified. User space
coordinate
units are 1/72 of an inch.
x y moveto
Starts a new subpath of the current path. moveto sets the current point in
the graphics state to the user space coordinate(x,y) without adding any line
segments to the current path. If the previous path operation in the current
path was
also a moveto, that point is deleted from the current path and the new moveto
point replaces it.
a(x) a(y) string ashow
Prints the characters of string in a manner similar to show. but while doing
so, ashow adjusts the width of each character shown by adding a(x) to its x
width
and a(y) to its y width, thus modifying the spacing between characters. a(x)
and
a(y) are x and y displacements in the user coordinate system (not the
character
coordinate system). This operator enables fitting a string of text to a
specific
width by adjusting all the spaces between characters by a uniform amount.
