Download Ghostscript 8.60

Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript page description language used by printers. Converts the graphics commands intended for the printer to a bitmap image. This image can then be sent to, for example, the screen. The developers have released version 8.60 of Ghostscript and provided the following announcement on the mailing list:

Artifex Software, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of GPL Ghostscript 8.60. This is the first in a new stable series.

The major milestone 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. Thanks to Till Kamppeter and Mike Sweet for making this possible.

This release also includes numerous important bug fixes over the previous stable versions, as well as improvements to performance, memory footprint, shading and image handling. We recommend this upgrade to all free users.

Note: The default device in the gcc build is temporarily the ‘bbox’ device instead of the usual ‘x11’ device. This is a side effect of the device modularization patch from ESP Ghostscript which could not be corrected before release. To recover the old default behavior add ‘-sDEVICE=x11’ to the command line.

Source packages are available from the usual locations. Windows packages will appear over the next few days.

Thanks to everyone whose hard work made this release possible!