The RFC Editor -- 2 Feb 1990 -- TCP/IP list
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/9002.mm.www/0177.html
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                     About RFCs in Postscript and Ascii

Hi:

RFCs have been traditionally published in ASCII text.

The IAB has decided that RFCs may be published in PostScript. This
decision is motivated by the desire to include diagrams, drawings, and
such in RFCs. It also allows authors that normally work with document
production tools that produce PostScript output to use their normal
tools. PostScript documents (on paper, so far) are visually more
appealing and have improved readability.

PostScript was chosen for the fancy form of RFC publication over other
possible systems (e.g., impress, interpress, oda) because of the
perceived wide spread availability of PostScript capable printers.

It has been pointed out that many RFC users read the documents online
and use various text oriented tools (e.g., emacs, grep) to search
them. Often, brief excerpts from RFCs are included in e-mail. These
practices are not yet practical with PostScript files.

Therefore, the IAB has also decided that when ever an RFC is published
in PostScript a secondary version of that RFC is to be made available
in ASCII text. This secondary version may be missing some elements of
the primary version (e.g., diagrams), and be formatted differently.

Work is in progress to provide the secondary versions of the
PostScript RFCs already published.

It has also been pointed out that PostScript is less standard that has
been assumed and that several of the document production systems that
claim to produce PostScript actually produce nonstandard results.

It may be necessary to identify a set of document production systems
authorized for use in production of PostScript RFCs, based on the
reasonableness of the output files they generate.

--jon. (The RFC Editor)