[gs-devel] AFPL Ghostscript 8.33 beta release

[Ralph Giles]

Artifex Software, Inc. and artofcode LLC are pleased to announce a new beta release, AFPL 
Ghostscript 8.33. This is the fourth testing release of our development tree toward the 8.50 major 
release. We believe this to be a candidate for release quality; we expect to follow it shortly 
with the first stable release.

This is a beta release and should not be used for production work; it is only intended for those 
interested in a preview of new features and to help us get wider testing. Please give it a try and 
let us know how it works with your system.

The release is available from SourceForge and mirror.cs.wisc.edu.

  ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/AFPL/gs833/
  https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1897&package_id=10647&release_id=284501

Currently only unix source tarballs are available; a Windows build will be posted soon.

New features in this version over the 8.1x releases:

    * Topological grid fitting, an original method developed for Ghostscript by Dr. Igor V. 
Melichev, improves the rendering of True Type fonts at small resolutions. See the documentation 
for GridFitTT for information on this feature.

    * The PDF writer now implements PDF 1.4 encryption. See the encryption parameter documentation 
for more information.

    * A new rendering method for shadings, developed for Ghostscript by Dr. Igor V. Melichev, 
improves the quality and performance of rasterization on continuous tone devices. The new method 
allows hardware or software acceleration with help of customizable routines for filling areas with 
a linearly varying color. functions.

    * This version contains the first release of Rinkj, an experimental new driver for some inkjet 
printers using ETS screening. See the Rinkj section for more information.

    * We now support PDF 1.5 files, including the new compression and encryption modes.

    * We have beta support for Jpeg2000 compressed images, using the JasPer compression library. 
This is only enabled as part of the default build in the autoconf (POSIX) build system in this 
release. 

MD5 checksums

    0525372e1e3fc587febc3cb2a3e57190 ghostscript-8.33.tar.bz2
    61f6f6de2c2e92e15ae8604d5c64d337 ghostscript-8.33.tar.gz 

SHA-1 checksums

    cea6616ea3a7cc7da81c45d7bcee3b5b862232c9 ghostscript-8.33.tar.bz2
    cfe95b359422a03c6546d45fcd180c20ee3081cc ghostscript-8.33.tar.gz 

Thanks to everyone whose hard work made this release possible!

 -r