Press Releases

January 4, 2000

GhostscriptTM 6.0 is a watershed event for Artifex®. Ghostscript 6.0 introduces the following new capabilities to the well established Ghostscript architecture:

PostScript LanguageLevel 3

  • PDF 1.3
  • PostScript to PDF distiller
  • Unified graphics library

PostScript LanguageLevel 3 and PDF

Artifex Software Inc. announces the release of Ghostscript 6.0 -- a commercially complete, multi-platform, high-performance, independent implementation of Adobe's PostScript LanguageLevel 3 page description language and PDF 1.3 document format. The PostScript language interpreter has passed the exhaustive Genoa test suites for PostScript LanguageLevel 3, ensuring compatibility and completeness with respect to Adobe's published standards.

Being based on Aladdin's long-established cross-platform Ghostscript architecture, Ghostscript 6.0 is immediately portable to all Ghostscript platforms (MS-DOS, MS Windows, Windows NT, Unix / Linux, Macintosh, OpenVMS, OS/2, and embedded) and output devices (displays and window systems, raster file formats like TIFF, and a wide variety of printers and plotters).

Artifex Software Inc., founded in 1993, has become known in the past 6 years for its exceptional PostScript and PDF software as a commercial supplier of fully competitive RIP technology to a wide variety of companies in the printing and document processing industries.

Ghostscript 6.0 "Distiller" Option

In addition to the rasterization capability for which Ghostscript has been long known, Ghostscript 6.0 features true high-level conversion from PostScript to PDF. Users may now convert PostScript files to PDF maintaining the text, font, and vector graphics information from the original file. The output files are competitive in size and quality with the output of Adobe's Acrobat(TM) Distiller(TM). Essentially all of Acrobat Distiller's image compression, resampling, and color space conversion facilities are available, as well as other capabilities such as control of font subsetting. Users may choose between Acrobat 3 and Acrobat 4 compatible output. This distilling option is available from Artifex's PostScript interpreter coupled with our PDF Writer.

Ghostscript 6.0 unified graphics library

In addition to implementing PostScript LanguageLevel 3 and PDF 1.3, Ghostscript 6.0 also unifies the underlying graphics library for Artifex's family of PCL interpreters. Our customers may now run PostScript, PDF, PCL5e (monochrome), PCL 5c (color), PCLXL (monochrome or color), and PCL6 (dual PCL) all on the same graphics library, with auto-detection and auto-switching from one language format to another.