GPL Ghostscript 8

Artifex Software, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of GPL Ghostscript 8.63.

This is the fourth scheduled release in the stable Ghostscipt 8.6x series. It corresponds to the 1.53 release of GhostPDL.

Source and binary packages are available from the usual locations: 

    * http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs863/ghostscript-8.63.tar.bz2
    * http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs863/ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz
    * http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/ghostpdl/ghostpdl-1.53.tar.bz2
    * http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs863/gs863w32.zip
    * http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs863/gs863w32.exe
    * http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1897&package_id=108733

=MD5 checksums= 

    * c770eedfdd846a53e211e3ba5339de21 ghostscript-8.63.tar.bz2
    * b22e689b237a6594d1ca408f2b55a891 ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz
    * fbadd96689d948c6f12755ca49546219 ghostpdl-1.53.tar.bz2
    * b9743af446212cdce0d0abac276d9716 gs863w32.exe
    * c05892712a842e951ebe0ae79ce229b9 gs863w64.exe

=SHA-1 checksums= 

    * c97159d3cccb0b1b5fc409715c6321a7256717ec ghostscript-8.63.tar.bz2
    * 58b648e0383d6167e5ea93b2dde033eceb366491 ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz
    * c3b48ee0f584c56cfcf8c5e81ddee937440fffb5 ghostpdl-1.53.tar.bz2
    * 6638dcb6aa30bc1c958f794411c6afabcea47fc5 gs863w32.exe
    * 7c3fe403f7a48dba72f3a8272c0155289e1da915 gs863w64.exe

Approximately 238 bugs have been fixed since version 8.62. Of particular note are robustness and performance improvements with large files, invalid PDF, and font handling. The ghostpdl release features improved XPS to PDF conversion as well as a number of other bug fixes.

The major new feature of this release is multithreaded rendering. This can be requested by passing -dNumRenderingThreads=n on the command line. The input document is first parsed, and then each page is split into n bands which are rendered concurrently. This can provide a significant reduction in processing time on multi-core systems.

Images are now always interpolated in their source colorspace. This improves correctness for XPS documents and avoids bypassing the custom color management callbacks for interpolated images. Interpolation and color management are both expensive operations, so this affects performance with large images. The effect can be positive or negative depending on the file and the target resolution. If performance is a problem, we suggest running with -dNOINTERPOLATION.

Support for OpenPrinting Vector devices has been upgraded to version 1.0.

There are two new devices in this release, both experimental. Behdad Esfahbod has contributed a cairo output device which uses the cairo graphics library to generate PDF, SVG, EPS, or PNG files, based on the requested filename extension. The svgwrite device directly outputs Scalable Vector Graphics, the W3C XML vector graphics format. Both support only vector art at this point; text and images will not be represented efficiently.

=Incompatible changes=

The maximum number of color components has been reduced to 8 (from 252) as a performance improvement. Eight is the largest number commonly used and the largest number for which we support continuous tone images. Users with special needs can restore the previous behavior by setting the GS_CLIENT_COLOR_MAX_COMPONENTS preprocessor symbol to the required number of components at compile time.

The -Z: debugging option now uses 'realtime' instead of 'usertime' when reporting timing information on unix-like systems. This has always been the case on windows-like systems.

Obsolete makefiles for the DesqView environment have been removed.

Thanks to everyone whose hard work made this release possible!

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