Software Update: Ghostscript 9.53.1

Version 9.53.1 of Ghostscript was released a few days ago. Ghostscript is an open source interpreter for the Adobe-developed PostScript markup language, a programming language for describing a set of text and images in a device-independent manner. In this way, a PostScript file should in principle be printed the same by every laser printer. Since version 9 is used iccprofiles for color formatting and from freetype for handling fonts. The changes are displayed as follows:

Version 9.53.1

Highlights in this release include:

• The 9.53.1 release is primarily maintenance.
• The most obvious change is the (re-)introduction of the patch level to the version number, this helps facilitate a revised policy on handling security related issues.
• Our efforts in code hygiene and maintainability continue.
• We have added the capability to build with the Tesseract OCR engine. In such a build, new devices are available (pdfocr8/pdfocr24/pdfocr32) which render the output file to an image, OCR that image, and output the image “wrapped” up as a PDF file, with the OCR generated text information included as “invisible” text (in PDF terms, text rendering mode 3).
  Due to some patches to the Tesseract sources that are required (integrated upstream, but awaiting release), time constraints, and the experimental nature of the feature, we only support including Tesseract from source, not linking to Tesseract shared libraries. Whether we add this capability will be largely dependent on community demand for the feature.
• We have added Python bindings for the gsapi interface, can be found in demos/python. These are experimental, and we welcome feedback from interested developers.
• For those integrating Ghostscript/GhostPDL via the gsapi interface, we have added new capabilities to that, specifically in terms of setting and interrogating device parameters. These, along with the existing interface calls, are documented in: Ghostscript Interpreter API
• IMPORTANT: In consultation with a representative of (OpenPrinting) it is our intention to deprecate and, in the not distant future, remove the OpenPrinting Vector/Raster Printer Drivers (that is, the opvp and oprp devices).
  If you rely on either of these devices, please get in touch with us, so we can discuss your use case, and revise our plans accordingly.
• IMPORTANT: We have forked LittleCMS2 into LittleCMS2mt (the “mt” indicating “multi-thread”). LCMS2 is not thread safe and cannot be made thread safe without breaking the ABI. Our fork will be thread safe and include performance enhancements (these changes have all be been offered and rejected upstream). We will maintain compatibility between Ghostscript and LCMS2 for a time, but not in perpetuity. If there is sufficient interest, our fork will be available as its own package separately from Ghostscript (and MuPDF).
• The usual round of bug fixes, compatibility changes, and incremental improvements.