Newly Released GNU Ghostscript 5.50 adds Eastern European character support

By Dwight Johnson

The popular Ghostscript PostScript enterpreter and PDF interpreter is now available in an open-source version. Alladin Enterprises has today announced the release of GNU Ghostscript 5.50.

GNU Ghostscript 5.50 is available from

ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/gnu/gs550

and from

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ghostscript

(and mirrors of this site - see http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html for a list of mirror ftp sites).

GNU Ghostscript should not be confused with Aladdin Ghostscript and the tarballs are now named gnu-gs-* rather than ghostscript-* to avoid any confusion.

The content of GNU Ghostscript 5.50 is Aladdin Ghostscript 5.50 with two enhancements:

• Approximately a dozen bug fixes that were posted on the Web site after the release.
• The expanded URW++ fonts with the full Adobe PostScript 3 character set (the additions are mostly Eastern European characters).

Alladin cautions:
"Please do not report problems with GNU Ghostscript 5.50 to Aladdin Enterprises (unless we did something really obvious and stupid in packaging the release): GNU Ghostscript releases are Free software and come with NO WARRANTY and NO SUPPORT. Aladdin Enterprises only accepts problem reports for the most recent release of Aladdin Ghostscript (currently Aladdin Ghostscript 6.0, released on February 3)".

The GNU Ghostscript project is now established on SourceForge and is actively looking for developers. Look to see the GNU Ghostscript 5.50 sources populate the project in the near future. Interested developers should contact L. Peter Deutsch at ghost@aladdin.com.

Aladdin Enterprises is a privately owned software business founded in 1986 and located on the San Francisco Peninsula.

Aladdin's best-known product is Ghostscript. According to the Aladdin Web site, Ghostscript is "possibly the world's most widely used second-source PostScript and PDF interpreter."

Ghostscript is included in most Linux distributions.

Sources: info-gnu@gnu.org and http://www.aladdin.com.