September 22, 2010
Artifex releases 9.0 Ghostscript
The latest release of Ghostscript is available for immediate download.
9.0 Ghostscript
This is the first release in the stable 9.x series. This release includes a move to an ICC-based color rendering workflow. The design allows easy integration of 3rd party color management modules (CMMs) and management of DeviceN and spot source colors with ICC profiles as well as with non-ICC proprietary methods. The default CMM is the well known littleCMS. PostScript color objects and non-ICC CIE-based PDF color spaces are converted to equivalent ICC profiles enabling complete color management for all color spaces by an ICC-based CMM. New command line options enable the specification of gray, rgb and cmyk default ICC profiles as well as output device ICC profiles. The new work flow provides performance improvements in the rendering of images, shadings and transparencies. In addition, the color conversions are designed to work efficiently in multithreaded display list (c-list) rendering through the use of a shared link cache. Finally, proper ICC based rendering now occurs for ALL XPS objects including Named colors, N-Channel colors and images with internally embedded ICC profiles. The second major change in this release is that glyph rendering for all font types except Type 3 is now handled by Freetype (via a much improved and enhanced Font API). The most obvious benefit of this is a complete, and proven implementation of the TrueType byte code interpreter (now unencumbered by patents). Another major change is that the PostScript interpreter's graphics state now stores two separate colour space settings for stroking and filling, to better support the stroke and fill colours required by the PDF interpreter. Finally, support for optional content has been added to the PDF interpreter. This release also includes a number of improvements to the pdfwrite device to improve reliability and quality with PCL and XPS input. Many improvements to the support of JPX images in PDF files, PDF annotation rendering and the usual number of general bug and robustness fixes. For security reasons, Ghostscript no longer searches the current directory by default. Use -P option to revert to old behavior.
Download Information
Please contact support@artifex.com or Scott.Sackett@artifex.com or
Miles.Jones@artifex.com for instructions on downloading the new
Artifex 9.0 OEM version.
MuPDF Updates to 0.7
The main new features in MuPDF 0.7:
* Transparency blend modes and soft masks.
* Grayscale mode renderer.
* Improved heuristics of text extraction for copy/paste and search.
* Internal improvements and optimizations of painting functions.
* Internal improvements to compression and stream filter architecture.
Upcoming features for 0.8:
* Improved image interpolation filters.
* PDF collections/packages
* Display annotations with appearance streams.
* New and improved demo viewer code with full document search and continuous scroll.
What is MuPDF?
MuPDF is a lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C. MuPDF is tailored for high quality anti-aliased graphics.
MuPDF renders text with metrics and spacing accurate to within fractions 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 full CJK support (including an Asian font) is approximately five megabytes.
MuPDF has support for 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.
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ARTIFEX IS HOSTING A BOOTH AT GRAPH EXPO OCT 3 - 6!
