Download Ghostscript 9.06

Version 9.06 of Ghostscript has been released. Ghostscript is an open source interpreter for the Adobe-developed PostScript markup language, a programming language for describing a set of text and images in a device-independent manner. In this way, a PostScript file should in principle be printed the same by every laser printer. Since version 9, a icc-definition for color formatting and of freetype for handling fonts. The main changes in this release are summarized below.

Changes in version 9.06:

• PDF/A-2 – pdfwrite now supports the creation of PDF/A-2 files. The ‘PDFA’ command line switch can now take a numeric parameter:
  • 0 = not PDF/A compliant
  • 1 = PDF/A-1b compliant
  • 2 = PDF/A-2b compliant
• Simply specifying “-dPDFA” continues to have the old behavior of creating PDF/A-1b files. For PDF/A-2 the command line should include “-dPDFA=2”.
• pdfwrite “Server mode” – pdfwrite can now be run in “server mode” which allows the device to be closed without closing the interpreter. This means it is no longer necessary to terminate GS before starting a new PDF conversion. This leads on to:
• pdfwrite now supports the “%d” format in the OutputFile switch. If this is set then pdfwrite will output each page of input to an individual file.
• ps2write – recent exposure to a range of PostScript devices has thrown up some interesting deficiencies in those devices. ps2write now emits PostScript in slightly different ways in order to produce output on a wider variety of devices. In some cases this also results in improved print times but it is still important to set the resolution appropriately for the output device, especially if the input contains transparency.
• Ghostscript can now use output intents defined in PDFs by using the “-dUsePDFX3Profile” command line option. See ICC Color Parameters for details.
• tiffsep/tiffsep1: support for large numbers of separations improved. The previous implementation of those devices utilized a “compressed color encoding” to represent the tints for all the plates in one 64 bit value. As the number of plates increased, fewer bits were available for the tint for each plate, ultimately resulting in an “unencodable pixels” error. These revisions remove the reliance on the compressed color encoding, thus ensuring that we have a consistent color bit depth, regardless of the number of plates, and ensuring the “unencodable pixels” error will never occur.
• Also as a result of these changes, there are substantial performance improvements in jobs with separations and transparency.
• tiffsep, psdcmyk and psdrgb now support the “downscaler” functionality. This brings the “tiffscaled” style functionality to the DeviceN output devices, so jobs can be rendered internally in contone and at a high resolution, and the output optionally downsampled by a level specified by “-dDownScaleFactor=n”, and also optionally error diffused to 1bpp output.
• Third party libraries: libtiff, libpng, libjpeg , Freetype and zlib have all be updated.
• clist storage, for rendering pages in bands, is now a run-time option: -sBandListStorage={file|memory}.
• Plus the usual round of bug fixes, compatibility changes, and incremental improvements.