Ghostscript is the name of a set of software that provides:

￭ An interpreter for the PostScript (TM) language and the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF -- sometimes confused with Acrobat, Adobe's PDF browser/editor product)

￭ A set of C procedures (the Ghostscript library) that implement the graphics and filtering (data compression / decompression / conversion) capabilities that appear as primitive operations in the PostScript language and in PDF.

The major achievement of this release is a merge from the ESP Ghostscript fork, used to support the CUPS printing system. This means that free operating systems can now ship a single copy of upstream Ghostscript with their releases.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· This release includes a move to an ICC-based color rendering workflow. The
· design allows easy integration of 3rd party color management modules (CMMs) and management of DeviceN and spot source colors with ICC profiles as well as with non-ICC proprietary methods. The default CMM is the well known littleCMS.

· Postscript color objects and non-ICC CIE-based PDF color spaces are converted to equivalent ICC profiles enabling complete color management for all color spaces by an ICC-based CMM. New command line options enable the specification of gray, rgb and cmyk default ICC profiles as well as output device ICC profiles. The new work flow provides performance improvements in the rendering of images, shadings and transparencies. In addition, the color conversions are designed to work efficiently in multithreaded display list (c-list) rendering through the use of a shared link cache. Finally, proper ICC based rendering now occurs for ALL XPS objects including Named colors, N-Channel color...