Artifex® has the most complete software
solution available for host-based applications
and the embedded printer marketplace, including
all PDLs (PDF, XPS, PostScript, and PCL),
fonts, and font rasterizers. We commercially
license and support Artifex Ghostscript®,
GhostxpsTM, Ghostpcl®,
and GhostpdfTM technologies.
Ghostscript software is an open technology,
evolved over the course of 15 years. It
is freely available on the net for unsupported
use, including prelicensing evaluation,
but not for distribution in or with commercial
products. If you want to use Ghostscript
technology for commercial purposes, you
are in the right place: we develop, license
and support Ghostscript software. See our
licensing page for more information on terms
of licensing.
Interpreters
Ghostscript software was originally a
PostScript language interpreter , but has
evolved into much more. We released Ghostpdf
in 1993, offering the first non-Adobe PDF
interpreter (Adobe Acrobat Portable Document
Format). We began demonstrating our GhostXPS
interpreter in January 2006. We also offer
Ghostpcl supporting Hewlett-Packard's PCL
5c, 5e, and XL languages. Artifex has been
demonstrating Ghostxps since January 2006,
and is an early-adopter of this new PDL
from Microsoft.
Distiller/Conversion
In addition to Ghostscript's interpreter/rasterizer
capabilities we now offer full "Distiller"
capability - the ability to convert from
XPS to PDF or PostScript to PDF while maintaining
high-level text, font, and vector graphics
information. Please see our press release
.
Graphics Library
We offer the Ghostscript graphics engine
as a separable module. This technology supports
the full richness of the PostScript LanguageLevel
3 imaging model (including gradient fills),
the XPS imaging model, the PDF 1.6 imaging
model (including transparency), and the
PCL5e/5c/XL imaging models (including RasterOp);
it can be used in your application without
the front-end interpreters, if desired.
Artifex Ghostscript has a large number of
back end file format and device driver modules
that enable it to produce many popular graphics
image file formats (TIFF, JPEG, EPS, etc)
as well as drive a host of raster devices.
Artifex Ghostscript is an excellent choice
if you're looking for a customized software
solution to a complex imaging problem, if
you want to support imaging devices for
which no interpreter is available for the
PDL(s) you need (XPS, PostScript, PDF, and/or
PCL).
Multi-platform Support
The Ghostscript family of technologies
is distributed with full source code and
has been ported on to all major platforms
and many embedded platforms, including Unix,
Linux, MS-WindowsVista/95/98/2000/NT, Macintosh,
OS/2, Vxworks, and VMS. Ghostscript is often
the first PostScript, PDF, and/or PCL interpreter
available on less widely used operating
systems.
Mindshare and Compatibility
Our objective is to create fully compatible
interpreters that will accept any legal
XPS, PostScript, PDF, or PCL file conforming
to the published specifications of these
languages. Beyond that, we realize that
vendors have implemented undocumented extensions
to these languages: we serve our customers
by implementing such extensions in Ghostscript
whenever they are commercially significant.
Ghostscript's freely available distributions
may well be the most widely used desktop
PDL interpreters on the Net. Ghostscript
has been integrated within more host-based
applications than any other PDL technology,
and as such has become a leader in mindshare.
Ghostscript is now widely recognized as
a de facto standard implementation of the
PostScript and PDF languages: for example,
many ACM-sponsored conferences specify "PostScript
acceptable to Ghostscript" as an approved
electronic submission format.
