[gs-devel] GPL Ghostscript 8.62 and GhostPDL 1.52 released

[Ralph Giles]

I'm pleased to announce the combined release of GPL Ghostscript 8.62  
and GhostPDL 1.52.

Source packages are available from http://ghostscript.com/releases/  
and http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php? 
group_id=1897&package_id=108733

Binary packages will be uploaded over the next few days, as will  
packages for the wisc.edu mirror.

This is the latest in our line of scheduled semi-annual releases.

There were approximately 55 bugs fixed since version 8.61. Also of  
note, the GPL font set for postscript is now included under the  
Resource directory, so a separate font download is no longer necessary.

Further, the ghostpdl-1.52 package contains the first stable version  
of our interpreter for Microsoft's XPS format. Conversion to PDF  
works with most documents.

SHA-1 checksums

a254a3bc4ca824ac90624090d175d17c0a22fed1 ghostscript-8.62.tar.bz2
93633326e08e8e02a279ea87ead91b10b2c430f3 ghostscript-8.62.tar.gz
94f07eacd810b849b780ce305f5337590378a1d2 ghostpdl-1.52.tar.bz2

MD5 checksums

40d673a3c6e11d2bf14f972b84551104 ghostscript-8.62.tar.bz2
1dd7f0cc9adbcd9e5d6082067cc43ebb ghostscript-8.62.tar.gz
7bc095bd6fd67e52a758608accb23bef ghostpdl-1.52.tar.bz2


Some fixes and improvements of note were:

COMPILE_INITS=1 was broken in 8.61 and now works as expected.

Fonts are now distributed in the Resource/Font directory and will be  
included in the executable if COMPILE_INITS=1

The tiffsep device was fixed for using more than 8 colorants.

Shadings, overprinting and transparency were optimized and are  
substantially faster than in 8.61, particularly for large format or  
high resolution rendering when using the 'clist' banding mode.

Changes were made to prevent near unbounded growth in memory usage  
and corresponding performance problems on a few test cases.

The 'pdfwrite' device was improved to fix some compatibility issues  
with PDF/A and to improve some font embedding and other issues.

The 'ht_ccsto.ps' Stochastic Threshold array was completely changed  
to be more useful. The values in the threshold array were inverted,  
so the number of 'light' colors was limited and using it generally  
caused prints that were too dark.

The 'runpdfbegin', 'dopdfpages' and 'runpdfend' PostScript pseudo- 
operators that were inadvertently removed in 8.61 were restored. This  
also restored the functionality of toolbin/pdf_info.ps to display PDF  
creator stats, fonts used and page sizes.

The halftone tile cache sizes and cache effectiveness were improved  
to help the performance when tiling with large cells or threshold  
arrays.

The default URW (GPL) fonts are now distributed in the Resource/Font/  
path which can increase the number of file handles open for  
PostScript that opens all of the resources. Also the size of the %rom 
% rom file system within the executable when using COMPILE_INITS=1 is  
larger by the amount needed for the fonts.

Also not strictly incompatible, but some alternate fixed-point code  
was stripped out, so FPU_TYPE and other FPU related makefile macros  
are gone or don't cause any difference in the code generated. Also  
the 'USE_ASM' macro was removed, since we expect modern compilers to  
do sufficient optimization.

Some old (deprecated) "helper" scripts were removed: gsindent,  
gssubst, many2pdf.tcl, and pre.

The unused 'cmap' (special color mapping) and 'ropc' devices were  
removed from the distribution.

The 'ht_ccsto.ps' Stochastic Threshold array was completely changed  
to be more useful. The values in the threshold array were inverted,  
so the number of 'light' colors was limited and using it generally  
caused prints that were too dark. This is an improvement, but  
incompatible in that anyone using it previously would see much  
different grays/ colors.

The SYSTEM_CONSTANTS_ARE_WRITABLE compile time define was removed as  
was the "EXTEND_NAMES" makefile macro (still accessible using a  
compiler flag define).

Thanks to everyone who made this release possible!

  -r