[gs-devel] GPL Ghostcript 8.63 and GhostPDL 1.53 released

[Paul Smedley]

FWIW - an OS/2 binary of Ghostscript 8.63 is available from 
http://www.smedley.info/os2ports/index.php?page=ghostscript

Ralph Giles wrote:
> 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
>     * 8b74772b4756d8afa915956c5808ba24 gs863w32.zip
> 
> SHA-1 checksums:
> 
>     * c97159d3cccb0b1b5fc409715c6321a7256717ec ghostscript-8.63.tar.bz2
>     * 58b648e0383d6167e5ea93b2dde033eceb366491 ghostscript-8.63.tar.gz
>     * c3b48ee0f584c56cfcf8c5e81ddee937440fffb5  ghostpdl-1.53.tar.bz2
>     * 6638dcb6aa30bc1c958f794411c6afabcea47fc5 gs863w32.exe
>     * f0fc28329fb34cc5c0147bdf9e30f4d3f489a63f gs863w32.zip
> 
> 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 in this release:
> 
> 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!
> 
>  -r
> 
> --
> Ralph Giles
> Ghostscript.com
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