3rd Quarter Newsletter for 2011
Artifex Business and Financial News
Look for a complete listing of our upcoming 2012 trade shows in the 4th Quarter Newsletter.
Artifex is pleased to announce the release of several new products from our OEM customers:
KNO: http://www.kno.com/
KNO makes educational software for tablets. They use our MuPDF pdf interpreter to view pdf documents within their application. MuPDF is an excellent choice to provide PDF viewing on a device with limited resources.
Oce: http://www.oceproductionprinting.com/products/varioprint3110/
Oce uses our Ghostscript PCL and XPS interpreters in their VarioPrint line of monochrome production printers. They are in the process of expanding this into their color production printer line. Oce monochrome printers are the fastest cut-sheet printers in the world (300 ppm). They are used by companies such as Amazon and Borders to print books on-demand. When you order a book on-line: one minute later the book has been printed.
Kyocera: http://usa.kyoceramita.com/
Kyocera has been using our Ghostscript PDF interpreter in all of their direct PDF color and monochrome printers for nearly a decade. They have recently released a new printer controller architecture with our latest PDF, and their new PDF printers are excellent.
Overall: Artifex is a privately-held corporation, so our finances are confidential. However we are very pleased to share that we have seen a modest upturn in revenue in 2011, and are looking forward to an even better 2012.
Technology News
The release of Ghostscript 9.04
New Color Fax devices
Last newsletter we extolled the advantages of using the 9.01 "tiffscaled" device for high resolution PDL rendering and subsequent downsampling. We recommended FAX customers consider using the new device. That was a monochrome solution. Now with the 9.04 release, we have grayscale and contone color capable devices: tiffscaled8 and tiffscaled24 respectively. Please have a look at these new devices to see if they are suitible for your workflow. As always, your feedback is welcome.
Text extraction
9.04 also brings a new experimental (alpha) text extraction device. This new device is able to retrieve text with heuristics to delineate words and preserve the underlying layout of the document. This has applications to searching, indexing and archiving of PDL documents. As devices and the graphics library are shared amongst all the languages, the new text output device can be used with all languages: PS, PDF, PCL XPS. Note, this is not OCR technology. The high level text information is extracted from the original PDL document.
Object Dependent Color Management
Ghostscript 9.04 provides significant flexibility for controlling color based upon the graphic object type. It is now possible to specify different ICC profiles (source and destination) and rendering intents for images, text, and vector graphics. This enables text to be readily printed with K only, while gray scale images can be printed with composite CMYK. In addition, vector graphics can be printed with an ICC profile that provides more saturated colors, while images will be printed using an ICC profile that provides perceptually pleasing images. For those who do not want to fool with creating specific ICC profiles to achieve black text, DeviceGray source colors can now easily be specified to map either to K only or composite CMYK when the output device supports CMYK colorants. In addition, internal ICC profiles in the document are now eadily overridden with Ghostscript's default profile.
MuPDF
What is MuPDF?
MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C. MuPDF is tailored for high quality anti-aliased text and graphics.
MuPDF renders text with metrics and spacing accurate to within fraction of a pixel for the highest fidelity in reproducing the look of a printed page on screen. MuPDF has a small footprint. A binary that includes the standard Roman fonts is only one megabyte. A build with the full CJK support (including an Asian font) is approximately five megabytes.
MuPDF supports all non-interactive PDF 1.7 features, and the toolkit provides a simple API for accessing the internal structures of the PDF document. Example code for navigating interactive links and bookmarks, encrypting PDF files, extracting fonts, images, and searchable text, and rendering pages to image files is provided.
Future developments of MuPDF include a dual interface that will allow the PDF interpreter to call both the high quality screen renderer and the more feature-complete Ghostscript graphics library to allow it to use Ghostscript's printer drivers and high-level output devices.
Everyone is rushing to the mobile device markets, and we believe PDF will be a critical player in this new environment. MuPDF is our lightweight PDF technology toolkit we are targeting for this market. We have running ports of MuPDF on iOS and Android. MuPDF has already been successful in the tablet market with KNO.
MuPDF 0.9 Release
Along with the Ghostscript 9.04 release, we are also releasing MuPDF 0.9. The MuPDF version 0.9 now also supports XPS, the Open XML Paper Specification is a page description language developed by Microsoft. XPS is used extensively in the Vista and Windows 7 printing pipeline. The XPS Document Writer is a virtual printer that works like Acrobat distiller, but is integrated in Windows, and creates XPS docuemnts. We also have added halftoning support to MuPDF.
Other News
Concurrent with both releases, we have set up an official download site where customers and open source users can obtain Artifex releases of all products at one single location:
http://www.ghostscript.com/download/
Thanks to all of you again for this opprtunity to commucate with you. I feel that this is a convenient and important medium to make our OEM customers and potential customers aware of new and significant changes within our growing company. As always, and we mean this sincerely, your questions or comments are always welcome.
