AFPL Ghostscript 8.55 review

Ghostscript is a processor for PostScript and PDF files

License: AFPL (Aladdin Free Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Raph Levien

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Ghostscript is a processor for PostScript and PDF files. AFPL Ghostscript can rasterize these files to a wide variety of printers, devices for screen preview, and image file formats.

Since applications tend to prepare pages for printing in a high-level format such as PostScript, most Unix users with low-level bitmap printers, such as inkjets, use GhostScript as part of the printing process.

In addition, Ghostscript is capable of converting PostScript files, functionality comparable to Adobe Acrobat Distiller, but on the command line. In addition, Ghostscript is used for file import and viewing by a great many other applications, including xv, ImageMagick, gimp, and xdvi.

Several GUI wrappers for viewing PostScript and PDF files exist, including GSview, ghostview, gv, ggv, and kghostview. This is far from a comprehensive list.

Here are some key features of "AFPL Ghostscript":
An interpreter for the PostScript (TM) language, with the ability to convert PostScript language files to many raster formats, view them on displays, and print them on printers that don't have PostScript language capability built in;
An interpreter for Portable Document Format (PDF) files, with the same abilities;
The ability to convert PostScript language files to PDF (with some limitations) and vice versa; and
A set of C procedures (the Ghostscript library) that implement the graphics capabilities that appear as primitive operations in the PostScript language.