Recent changes in Ghostscript

# Changes in the most recent release of Ghostscript

This document is news about the most recent Ghostscript release. For earlier versions, see the history documents:

> History of Ghostscript versions 9.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 8.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 7.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 6.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 5.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 4.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 3.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 2.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 1.n

For other information, see the Ghostscript overview.

## Version 9.06 (2012-08-08)

This is the sixth full release in the stable 9.x series.

Highlights in this release include:

- 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 behaviour 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 utilised 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.

In addition, Ghostscript and GhostPDL 8.71 are now unsupported, and those still using those versions (or earlier ones) should migrate to 9.x as soon as possible since many improvements, features and fixes from the 9.x versions are impractical or impossible to back-port to these legacy versions.

For a list of open issues, or to report problems, please visit bugs.ghostscript.com.

### Incompatible changes

No recorded incompatible changes.

### Changelog

See the history file for complete log of changes.

Copyright © 2005-2011 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

This software is provided AS-IS with no warranty, either express or implied. This software is distributed under license and may not be copied, modified or distributed except as expressly authorized under the terms of that license. Refer to licensing information at http://www.artifex.com/ or contact Artifex Software, Inc., 7 Mt. Lassen Drive - Suite A-134, San Rafael, CA 94903, U.S.A., +1(415)492-9861, for further information.

Ghostscript version 9.06, 8 August 2012