AFPL Ghostscript 8.00


Posted 26 Nov 2002 by raph

Artifex Software Inc. and artofcode LLC are pleased to announce the release of Ghostscript 8.00, the most comprehensive software solution for page description languages. Ghostscript is a leader in PDF, PostScript, and PCL technologies. Ghostscript 8.00 features the following new capabilities:

DeviceN color

With the 8.00 release, Ghostscript now offers true DeviceN color space support, natively rendering spot colors, multicolor images, and gradient effects up to 8 color planes. DeviceN also affords direct and precise control over ink balances in large format inkjet devices. Ghostscript currently powers inkjet RIPs from Best Color GmbH, Xerox XES (in partnership with Caldera Graphics), MacDermid/ColorSpan, and Mutoh America.

Spot color

Ghostscript 8.00 fully supports spot colors and Separation color spaces. This functionality is actually a subset of DeviceN color spaces, and hasa high performance implementation.

Overprint

Ghostscript 8.00 also brings native rendering of overprint and overprint mode, as specified in PDF 1.3, and PostScript LanguageLevel 3. Thus, Ghostscript's power and efficiency is now brought to new domains, including packaging, high end prepress, and others.

Well Tempered Screening

Integration of "Well Tempered Screening", an imagesetter-optimized screening technology from artofcode LLC. WTS produces exact irrational angles, as opposed to the rational supercell approximation common in most competitive RIPs. Dots are exceptionally smooth, even at relatively high rulings and low resolutions. Screener-induced (internal) moire is virtually eliminated. In addition, the WTS integration provides significantly higher throughput when rendering precise color angles than previous Ghostscript releases.

DiskN

Ghostscript now implements DiskN file resources within PostScript, significantly improving the integration with font downloading utilities.

Ghostscript 8.00 can be downloaded from mirror.cs.wisc.edu and sourceforge.net.

Please see Obtaining AFPL Ghostscript 8.00 for more details.