GPL Ghostscript
Ghostscript is the name of a set of software that provides:
- An interpreter for the PostScript (TM) language and the Adobe
Portable Document Format (PDF -- sometimes confused with Acrobat,
Adobe's PDF browser/editor product), and
- A set of C procedures (the Ghostscript library) that implement
the graphics and filtering (data compression / decompression
/ conversion) capabilities that appear as primitive operations
in the PostScript language and in PDF.
Obtaining GPL Ghostscript
You can always get the current version of GPL Ghostscript from
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/ or
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostscript/
Ghostscript is a copyrighted work (artofcode LLC owns the copyright);
it is not shareware or in the public domain.
Versions entitled GPL Ghostscript are distributed with the GNU
General Public License, which allows free use, and free copying and
redistribution under certain conditions (including, in some cases,
commercial distribution). Releases made prior to 2004 were part of the
GNU project and were titled GNU
Ghostscript. The current development code is available under a more
restrictive license as AFPL Ghostscript. A
commercial version is also available from Artifex Software.
The Ghostscript source code distribution, and the Ghostscript executable
code, include the following libraries obtained from other parties:
- The Independent JPEG Group (IJG)
library. The executable versions
of Ghostscript are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
For more information, please see the file jpeg.mak in the main Ghostscript
source directory, and the README file in the jpeg subdirectory of the
Ghostscript source code.
- The PNG library
created
by Dave Martindale, Guy Eric Schalnat,
Paul Schmidt, and Tim Wegner, of Group 42, Inc. For more information,
please see the libpng.mak file in the main Ghostscript source directory, and
the files readme.txt and png.h in the libpng subdirectory of the Ghostscript
source code.
- The zlib library created by
Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler. For
more information, please see the zlib.mak file in the main Ghostscript
source directory, and the README file in the zlib subdirectory of the
Ghostscript source code.
These libraries do NOT fall under either the GNU License or the Aladdin
Ghostscript Free Public License; they come with their own licenses, which
also allow free use and redistribution under appropriate circumstances and
which appear in the files referenced just above. These libraries are
entirely original works of their respective authors, and are provided "AS
IS" with NO WARRANTY and NO SUPPORT.
What platforms does Ghostscript run on?
Ghostscript is written entirely in C, with special care taken to make it run
properly on a wide variety of systems, including MS Windows, Apple
MacOS, the wide variety of Unix and Unix-like platforms and VMS systems.
Other information on the WWW
There is an alternate home page at
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
- GPL Ghostscript 8.54
- GPL Ghostscript 8.51
- GPL Ghostscript 8.50
- GPL Ghostscript 8.15
- GPL Ghostscript 8.01
- GNU Ghostscript 7.07
- GNU Ghostscript 7.06
- GNU Ghostscript 7.05
- GNU Ghostscript 6.53
- GNU Ghostscript 6.52
- GNU Ghostscript 6.51
- GNU Ghostscript 5.50
- GNU Ghostscript 5.10
- GNU Ghostscript 4.03
- Previewers
- Ghostview
is a freely available X Windows screen previewer based on Ghostscript.
- GV
is a modified version of Ghostview, generally preferred to the
original Ghostview..
Last update $Date: 2006-06-02 15:07:28 -0500 (Fri, 02 Jun 2006) $.