November 1, 2010
Abstract from the Hardcopy Observer
Abstract: [November 1, 2010] Twenty years ago, Artifex pioneered the dual-licensing model—offering open source and commercial licensing options from the s...
Observer Spotlight: Artifex Software
Ghostscript is the foundation of Artifex's printing and imaging business, and mμPDF is helping the firm expand into mobile devices
[November 1, 2010] Twenty years ago, Artifex pioneered the dual-licensing model—offering open source and commercial licensing options from the same code base—for its Ghostscript Technologies, and along the way, the firm has been home to a number of firsts in the printing and imaging industry: the first PDL vendor to provide full source code (1990), the first non-Adobe release of a PDF interpreter (GhostPDF in 1993), the first non-HP release of a PCL XL interpreter (GhostPCL in 1996), and the first non-Adobe release of PDF 1.4 transparency (GhostPDF in 2001).
Artifex open-source licensing option for Ghostscript is called General Public License (GPL) Ghostscript, and Scott Sackett, vice president of sales for Artifex Software, Inc., tells us that GPL Ghostscript is the printing architecture for every Linux distribution. As a result, literally millions of copies of GPL Ghostscript are distributed every year. He claims that GPL Ghostscript is used by every major commercial, academic, and governmental organization around the world.
Artifex also provides a Commercial License Ghostscript, and the firm currently has more than 100 OEM customers worldwide that license a wide range of page description languages (PDLs), including PostScript Language Level 3, PDF 1.7, PCL 5e, PCL 5c, PCL XL, and Microsoft XPS; font technologies; and screening technologies. Artifex also licenses MμPDF (a lightweight PDF interpreter designed specifically for hand-held devices, cell phones, e-books, electronic tablets, etcetera), and the developer offers solutions for PostScript to PDF conversion/creation and XPS to PDF conversion/creation. Artifex says that its Ghostscript software solution set operates on all major platforms and most embedded system CPUs.
According to Sackett, Artifex has an interesting set of unusual characteristics in that the firm is consistently profitable (60+ consecutive profitable quarters), has a distributed staff that consists of engineers located across four countries, carries no corporate debt, is privately held, and has never had a layoff. Moreover, Sackett asserts that because Artifex does not “sell” any end-user product, the firm has very little need for advertising and is often underestimated and overlooked by industry experts. Yet the firm’s 100 OEM customers exceed that of any of Artifex’s competitors with the exception of Adobe.
New Releases
Artifex recently released Ghostscript 9.0, which includes several major changes.
A move to an ICC-based color rendering workflow;
glyph rendering for all font types except Type 3 is now handled by Freetype;
the PostScript interpreter’s graphics state now store two separate color space settings for stroking and filling; and
support for optional content has been added to the PDF interpreter.
The firm says that Ghostscript 9.0 also includes a number of improvements to the pdfwrite device to improve reliability and quality with PCL and XPS input, support of JPX images in PDF files, and PDF annotation rendering. The latest release of Ghostscript is available for immediate download.
Artifex also released MμPDF 0.7, which provides transparency blend modes and soft masks, a grayscale mode renderer, improved heuristics of text extraction for copy/paste and search, internal improvements and optimizations of painting functions, and internal improvements to compression and stream filter architecture. New functionality planned for MμPDF 0.8 includes improved image interpolation filters, PDF collections/packages, display annotations with appearance streams, and new and improved demo viewer code with full document search and continuous scroll.
Artifex
is a leading core technology provider with the most
comprehensive software solution for the embedded
printing market. Artifex's Ghostscript offers all
the major leading Page Distribution Languages (PDLs)
including Portable Document Format (PDF), Postscript,
XPS "Metro", PCL5e/c, and PCLXL (together
= PCL6), along with high-performance screening technologies
and a combination of fonts compatible with leading
printers. No other software vendor offers a solution
this complete. Millions of users have benefited
from its ability to preview documents on the screen
or provide high quality raster for hardcopy output.
In addition, Artifex's Ghostscript combines the
tools, information and technical support needed
in order to meet the reliability and performance
requirements of its OEM customers. Artifex's Ghostscript
has been integrated with over 80 OEM customers'
products, including: activePDF, Hewlett Packard,
IBM, Kyocera, Macromedia and Xerox. Artifex's Ghostscript
software solution set operates on all major platforms
as well as most embedded system CPU's.
