Ghostscript is a processor for PostScript and PDF files. It can rasterize these files to a wide variety of printers, devices for screen preview, and image file formats. Since applications tend to prepare pages for printing in a high-level format such as PostScript, most Unix users with low-level bitmap printers, such as inkjets, use GhostScript as part of the printing process. In addition, Ghostscript is capable of converting PostScript files, functionality comparable to Adobe Acrobat Distiller, but on the command line. In addition, Ghostscript is used for file import and viewing by a great many other applications, including xv, ImageMagick, gimp, and xdvi. Several GUI wrappers for viewing PostScript and PDF files exist, including GSview, ghostview, gv, ggv, and kghostview. This is far from a comprehensive list.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
The tiffsep device was fixed for using more than 8 colorants. Shadings, overprinting, and transparency were optimized and are substantially faster. Changes were made to prevent nearly unbounded growth in memory usage and corresponding performance problems on a few test cases. The 'pdfwrite' device was improved to fix some compatibility issues with PDF/A and to improve some font embedding and other issues. The halftone tile cache sizes and cache effectiveness were improved to help the performance when tiling with large cells or threshold arrays. Many other issues were resolved.
More...
03-04-2008
