Ghostscript
Stable release
Original author(s)	L. Peter Deutsch
Developer(s)	Artifex Software^[1]
Initial release	August 11, 1988; 31 years ago^[2]
Repository
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	PostScript and PDF interpreter
License	Dual-licensed (GNU Affero General Public License + commercial permissive exception)
Website	www.ghostscript.com

Ghostscript Ps To Pdf Command Line
Ghostscript Postscript To Pdf Converter
Postscript To Pdf Online

Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language^[5] files, for the display or printing of document pages, and the conversion between PostScript and PDF files.^[6]

Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages.Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, for the display or printing of document pages, and the conversion between PostScript and PDF files.

Features[edit]

The Convert PDF service converts PDF documents to PostScript and to a number of image formats (JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, and TIFF). Converting a PDF document to PostScript is useful for unattended server-based printing on any PostScript printer. Converting a PDF document to a multipage TIFF file is.
Ghostscript is an interpreter for PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) files. It consists of a PostScript interpreter layer, and a graphics library. GhostPDF is an interpreter built on top of Ghostscript that handles PDF files. It relies on extensions to the PostScript language/imaging.
Ghostscript, GhostPCL, GhostXPS, and GhostPDL Downloads. This page will help direct you to downloads and information about the open source and commercially licensed releases for: Ghostscript, GhostPCL, GhostXPS, and GhostPDL.

Ghostscript can be used as a raster image processor (RIP) for raster computer printers—for instance, as an input filter of line printer daemon—or as the RIP engine behind PostScript and PDF viewers.

Ghostscript can also be used as a file format converter, such as PostScript to PDF converter. The ps2pdf conversion program, which comes with the ghostscript distribution, is described by its documentation as a 'work-alike for nearly all the functionality (but not the user interface) of Adobe's Acrobat Distiller product'.^[7] This converter is basically a thin wrapper around ghostscript's pdfwrite output device, which supports PDF/A-1 and PDF/A-2 as well as PDF/X-3 output.^[7]

Ghostscript can also serve as the back-end for PDF to raster image (png, tiff, jpeg, etc.) converter; this is often combined with a PostScript printer driver in 'virtual printer' PDF creators.^[8]^{[citation needed]}

As it takes the form of a language interpreter, Ghostscript can also be used as a general purpose programming environment.

Ghostscript has been ported to many operating systems, including Unix-like systems, classic Mac OS, OpenVMS, Microsoft Windows, Plan 9, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, OS/2, Atari TOS and AmigaOS.

History[edit]

Ghostscript was originally written^[9] by L. Peter Deutsch for the GNU Project, and released under the GNU General Public License in 1986. Later, Deutsch formed Aladdin Enterprises to dual-license Ghostscript also under a proprietary license with an own development fork: 'Aladdin Ghostscript' under the Aladdin Free Public License^[10] (which, despite the name, is not a free software license, as it forbids commercial distribution) and 'GNU Ghostscript' distributed with the GNU General Public License.^[11] With version 8.54 in 2006, both development branches were merged again, and dual-licensed releases were still provided.^[12]^[13]

Ghostscript is currently owned by Artifex Software and maintained by Artifex Software employees and the worldwide user community. According to Artifex, as of version 9.03, the commercial version of Ghostscript can no longer be freely distributed for commercial purposes without purchasing a license, though the (A)GPL variant allows commercial distribution provided all code using it is released under the (A)GPL.^[14] Artifex' point of view on 'aggregated software' was challenged in court for MuPDF.^[15]^[16]^[17]

In February 2013, Ghostscript changed its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL in version 9.07, ^[18]^[19] which raised license compatibility questions for example by Debian.^[20]

Variants and forks[edit]

Aladdin Ghostscript 5.50 (1998-09-17) and 6.01 (2000–03-17)^[21]
AFPL Ghostscript^[22] is Aladdin Ghostscript under the AFPL, 6.50 (2000-12-05) to 8.54 (2006-05-17), now abandoned.^[12]^[13]
AGPL Ghostscript is the canonical variant available, since February 2013,^[18] under the GNU Affero General Public License which is a free software license.
GNU Ghostscript is part of the GNU project and is now derived from GPL Ghostscript.
GPL Ghostscript is the basis for Display Ghostscript, which adds Display PostScript functionality support.
Ghostscript is the current commercial proprietary version licensed by Artifex Software for inclusion in closed-source products.
Ghost Trap is a variant of GPL Ghostscript secured and sandboxed using Google Chrome's sandbox technology.
ESP Ghostscript was a GPL Ghostscript fork for ESP's CUPS and merged with GPL Ghostscript.^[23]

Front ends[edit]

Ghostscript GUIs view PostScript or PDF files on screens, scroll, page forward, page backward, zoom text, and print page(s).

GSview (Version 5 and 6 are now unsupported) ^[24]^[25]^[26]
IrfanView import and display PDF files
Inkscape import and display PDF files
virtual printers - to create PDF files

Free fonts[edit]

There are several sets of free fonts supplied for Ghostscript, intended to be metrically compatible with common fonts attached with the PostScript standard.^[27]^[28]^[29]^[30] These include:

35 basic PostScript fonts contributed by URW++ Design and Development Incorporated, of Hamburg, Germany in 1996 under the GPL and AFPL.^[31]^[32]^[33]^[34]^[35] It is a full set fonts similar to the classic Adobe set: Bookman L (Bookman), Century Schoolbook L (New Century Schoolbook), Chancery L (Zapf Chancery), Dingbats (Zapf Dingbats), Gothic L (Avant Garde), Nimbus Mono L (Courier), Nimbus Roman No9 L (Times), Nimbus Sans L (Helvetica), Palladio L (Palatino), Standard Symbols L (Symbol), in Type1, TrueType, and OpenType formats.
The GhostPDL package (including Ghostscript as well as companion implementations of HP PCL and Microsoft XPS) includes additional fonts under the AFPL which bars commercial use.^[30]^[36] It includes URW++ versions of Garamond (Garamond No. 8), Optima (URW Classico), Arial (A030), Antique Olive, and Univers (U001), Clarendon,^[a]Coronet, Letter Gothic, as well as URW Mauritius^[b] and a modified form of Albertus known as A028. Combined with the base set, they represent a little more than half of the standard PostScript 3 font complement.
A miscellaneous set including Cyrillic, kana, and fonts derived from the free Hershey fonts, with improvements by Thomas Wolff (such as adding

Ghostscript Postscript To Pdf