Ghostscript

Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language^[5] files, for the display or printing of document pages, and the conversion between PostScript and PDF files.^[6]

Features

Ghostscript can be used as a raster image processor (RIP) for raster computer printers—for instance, as an input filter of line printer daemon—or as the RIP engine behind PostScript and PDF viewers.

Ghostscript can also be used as a file format converter, such as PostScript to PDF converter. The ps2pdf conversion program, which comes with the ghostscript distribution, is described by its documentation as a "work-alike for nearly all the functionality (but not the user interface) of Adobe's Acrobat Distiller product".^[7] This converter is basically a thin wrapper around ghostscript's pdfwrite output device, which supports PDF/A-1 and PDF/A-2 as well as PDF/X-3 output.^[7]

Ghostscript can also serve as the back-end for PDF to raster image (png, tiff, jpeg, etc.) converter; this is often combined with a PostScript printer driver in "virtual printer" PDF creators.^[8]

As it takes the form of a language interpreter, Ghostscript can also be used as a general purpose programming environment.

Ghostscript has been ported to many operating systems, including Unix-like systems, classic Mac OS, OpenVMS, Microsoft Windows, Plan 9, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, OS/2, Atari TOS and AmigaOS.

History

Ghostscript was originally written^[9] by L. Peter Deutsch for the GNU Project, and released under the GNU General Public License in 1986. Later, Deutsch formed Aladdin Enterprises to dual-license Ghostscript also under a proprietary license with an own development fork: "Aladdin Ghostscript" under the Aladdin Free Public License^[10] (which, despite the name, is not a free software license, as it forbids commercial distribution) and "GNU Ghostscript" distributed with the GNU General Public License.^[11] With version 8.54 in 2006, both development branches were merged again, and dual-licensed releases were still provided.^[12][13]

Ghostscript is currently owned by Artifex Software and maintained by Artifex Software employees and the worldwide user community. According to Artifex, as of version 9.03, the commercial version of Ghostscript can no longer be freely distributed for commercial purposes without purchasing a license, though the (A)GPL variant allows commercial distribution provided all code using it is released under the (A)GPL.^[14] Artifex' point of view on "aggregated software" was challenged in court for MuPDF.^[15][16][17]

In February 2013, Ghostscript changed its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL,^[18][19] which raised license compatibility questions for example by Debian.^[20]

Variants and forks

• Aladdin Ghostscript 5.50 (1998-09-17) and 6.01 (2000-03-17)^[21]
• AFPL Ghostscript^[22] is Aladdin Ghostscript under the AFPL, 6.50 (2000-12-05) to 8.54 (2006-05-17), now abandoned.^[23][24]
• AGPL Ghostscript is the canonical variant available, since February 2013,^[18] under the GNU Affero General Public License which is a free software license.
• GNU Ghostscript is part of the GNU project and is now derived from GPL Ghostscript.
• GPL Ghostscript is the basis for Display Ghostscript, which adds Display PostScript functionality support.
• Ghostscript is the current commercial proprietary version licensed by Artifex Software for inclusion in closed-source products.
• Ghost Trap is a variant of GPL Ghostscript secured and sandboxed using Google Chrome's sandbox technology.
• ESP Ghostscript was a GPL Ghostscript fork for ESP's CUPS and merged with GPL Ghostscript.^[25]

Front ends

Ghostscript GUIs view PostScript or PDF files on screens, scroll, page forward, page backward, zoom text, and print page(s).

• Evince (Windows Unix-like)^[26]
• GSview^[27] (Windows OS/2 Unix-like/GTK+) Aladdin Free Public Licence. Nag screen^[28] urges users to register, A$40 with Ghostgum Software.^[29] Ghostscript recommends GSview.^{[30][31][32][33]} versions 1-6 by Ghostgum Software Pty Ltd, 6+ by Artifex Software LLC^{[34][35][36][37][38]}
• Ghostscript Studio (Windows) Ghostscript GUI to convert and view PDF and PostScript files.
• Ghostview (Unix-like/X11)
• gv (Unix-like/X11 VMS) gv is a fork of Ghostview.
• KGhostView (Unix-like/X11) KDE3 port of Ghostview.
• mgv (Unix-like/X11) Motif Ghostscript GUI
• Moonshiner Ghostscript GUI converts from PostScript to PDF.
• Okular (Unix-like/X11 Windows/KDE4)
• PDF Blender (Windows) Ghostscript GUI to convert and view PDF and PostScript files.
• PS_View (Windows Unix-like Mac OS X); TeX Live's default Windows PostScript viewer.^[39]
• IrfanView import and display PDF files
• Inkscape import and display PDF files
• virtual printers - to create PDF files^[40]

Wrappers

Libraries that provides ability to access Ghostscript library from various programming languages.

• Ghostscript.NET .NET Ghostscript library wrapper written in C#.

Free fonts

There are several sets of free fonts supplied for Ghostscript, intended to be metrically compatible with common fonts attached with the PostScript standard.^{[41][42][43][44][45]} These include:

• 35 basic PostScript fonts contributed by URW++ Design and Development Incorporated, of Hamburg, Germany in 1996 under the GPL and AFPL.^{[46][47][48][49][50][51]} It is a full set of Type1 fonts similar to the classic Adobe set: Bookman L (Bookman), Century Schoolbook L (New Century Schoolbook), Chancery L (Zapf Chancery), Dingbats (Zapf Dingbats), Gothic L (Avant Garde), Nimbus Mono L (Courier), Nimbus Roman No9 L (Times), Nimbus Sans L (Helvetica), Palladio L (Palatino), Standard Symbols L (Symbol).
• The GhostPDL package (including Ghostscript as well as companion implementations of HP PCL and Microsoft XPS) includes additional fonts,^[52] including URW++ versions of Garamond (Garamond No. 8), Optima (URW Classico), Arial (A030), Antique Olive, and Univers (U001), Clarendon,^{[lower-alpha 1]} Coronet, Letter Gothic, as well as URW Mauritius^{[lower-alpha 2]} and a modified form of Albertus known as A028. Combined with the base set, they represent a little more than half of the standard PostScript 3 font complement.
• A miscellaneous set including Cyrillic, kana, and fonts derived from the free Hershey fonts, with improvements by Thomas Wolff (such as adding accented characters).

The Ghostscript fonts were developed in the PostScript Type 1 format but have been converted into the TrueType format, usable by most current software, and are popularly used within the open-source community.^[53][54]

See also

• Common Unix Printing System
• Foomatic
• PostScript Printer Description
• Printer driver
• pstoedit

References

Notes

External links

• Official website
• Ghostscript version 8.56 and earlier
• Ghostscript/GhostPDL binaries download page at Github (cross-platform, this site is actively maintained)
• GPL Ghostscript binaries download page at SourceForge (cross-platform, this site is no longer actively maintained)