Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, for the display or printing of document pages, and the conversion between PostScript and PDF files.

Features

Ghostscript can be used as a raster image processor (RIP) for raster

computer printer In computing, a printer is a peripheral machine which makes a persistent representation of graphics or text, usually on paper. While most output is human-readable, bar code printers are an example of an expanded use for printers. Differ ...

s—for instance, as an input filter of

line printer daemon The Line Printer Daemon protocol/Line Printer Remote protocol (or LPD, LPR) is a network printing protocol for submitting print jobs to a remote printer. The original implementation of LPD was in the Berkeley printing system in the BSD UNIX opera ...

—or as the RIP engine behind PostScript and PDF viewers. It can also be used as a file format converter, such as PostScript to PDF converter. The ps2pdf conversion program comes with the Ghostscript distribution. 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. 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 Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Plan 9 Plan 9 or Plan Nine may refer to: Music * Plan 9 (band), a psychedelic rock band from Rhode Island * ''Plan 9'', an album by Big Guitars From Memphis with Rick Lindy * "Plan 9", a song on the 1993 album ''Gorgeous'' by electronica band 808 Stat ...

, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, OS/2,

ArcaOS ArcaOS is an operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM. It was codenamed Blue Lion during its development. It builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing defects and l ...

Atari TOS TOS (The Operating System) is the operating system of the Atari ST range of computers. This range includes the 520ST and 1040ST, their STF/M/FM and STE variants and the Mega ST/STE. Later, 32-bit machines ( TT, Falcon030) were developed using a ...

, RISC OS and AmigaOS.

History

Ghostscript was originally written by L. Peter Deutsch for the GNU Project, and released under the GNU General Public License in 1988. At the time of the initial release there was a similar commercial software product named GoScript from LaserGo. 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 (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''. With version 8.54 in 2006, both development branches were merged again, and dual-licensed releases were still provided.''"I have some great news to report. The leading edge of Ghostscript development is now under GPL license, as is the latest release, Ghostscript 8.54."'' 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. In February 2013, with version 9.07, Ghostscript changed its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL. which raised license compatibility questions, for example by

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

. Starting with release 9.55.0 Ghostscript has two build-in PDF interpreters. Until spring 2022, up to Ghostscript version 9.56.1, the default PDF interpreters implementation itself was coded in PostScript. The new default PDF interpreter has been rewritten in C entirely, and is faster and more secure than its predecessor, while its interface and graphics library have not changed. Scripting the new C written PDF interpreter from PostScript is still possible.

Front ends

Ghostscript graphical user interfaces (GUIs) view PostScript or PDF files on screens, scroll, page forward, page backward, zoom text, and print pages. Such GUIs include

Evince Evince (), also known as GNOME Document Viewer, is a free and open source document viewer supporting many document file formats including PDF, PostScript, DjVu, TIFF, XPS and DVI. It is designed for the GNOME desktop environment. The develo ...

, IrfanView, Inkscape and PDF24 Creator. Virtual printers can also create PDF files.

Free fonts

There are several sets of

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

fonts supplied for Ghostscript, intended to be metrically compatible with common fonts attached with the PostScript standard. These include: * Contributed by German foundry

URW++ URW Type Foundry GmbH (formerly URW++ Design & Development GmbH) is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the d ...

in 1996 under the GPL and

AFPL The Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter. History The license was derived from the GNU General Public License, but differs on two key points ...

, this collection includes 35 font styles from 10 typeface families and is therefore commonly called the URW Base 35 fonts or URW Core 35 fonts. The collection is similar to the 35 fonts defined by Adobe in PostScript Level 2: Bookman L ( Bookman), Century Schoolbook L (

New Century Schoolbook Century is a family of serif type faces particularly intended for body text. The family originates from a first design, Century Roman, cut by American Type Founders designer Linn Boyd Benton in 1894 for master printer Theodore Low De Vinne, for u ...

), Chancery L ( Zapf Chancery), Dingbats ( Zapf Dingbats), Gothic L (

Avant Garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or 'vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical De ...

), Nimbus Mono L ( Courier), Nimbus Roman No9 L ( Times),

Nimbus Sans L Nimbus Sans is a sans-serif typeface created by URW++, based on Helvetica. Nimbus Sans It is a version using URW++ font source. The family supports Western Europe, East Europe, Turkish, Baltic, and Romanian languages. The font names ending with ...

( Helvetica), Palladio L (

Palatino Palatino is the name of an old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Named after the 16th-century Italia ...

), Standard Symbols L (

Symbol A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...

), in Type1, TrueType, and OpenType formats. *The GhostPDL package (including Ghostscript as well as companion implementations of HP PCL and Microsoft XPS) includes additional fonts under the AFPL which bars commercial use. It includes URW++ versions of Garamond (Garamond No. 8),

Optima Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf and released by the D. Stempel AG foundry, Frankfurt, West Germany in 1958. Though classified as a sans-serif, Optima has a subtle swelling at the terminals suggesting a glyphic ...

(URW Classico), Arial (A030), Antique Olive, and

Univers Univers () is a large sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a Grotesque (typeface classification), neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteen ...

(U001), Clarendon, Coronet, Letter Gothic, as well as URW Mauritius 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 , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

, 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. As a result, a user can install and use the Ghostscript fonts via most modern software. Furthermore, the Ghostscript fonts are used as parts of various open source applications, e.g., the Linux version of

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized task ...

depends on Graphviz which in turn depends on the Ghostscript fonts. Finally, multiple open source font projects used glyphs from the Ghostscript fonts, e.g., the Latin characters of GNU FreeFont are based on Nimbus Mono L, Nimbus Roman No9 L, and

. The TeX Gyre fonts are also based on 8 out of the 10 original Ghostscript typeface families. The Garamond font has additionally been improved upon.

References

External links