Bug 510324

Summary: Ghostscript never updated since 8.62 (dated 2008-02-29): now have 8.64!!!
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.2 Reporter: Carlo Strata <carlo.strata>
Component: PrintingAssignee: Johannes Meixner <jsmeix>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Johannes Meixner <jsmeix>
Severity: Enhancement    
Priority: P5 - None CC: jsmeix
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: openSUSE 11.1   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---
Attachments: Change log history file, version 8.x related

Description Carlo Strata 2009-06-05 11:25:32 UTC
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; it; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090426 SUSE/3.5b4-7.1 Firefox/3.5b4

Hi everyone!

It is a long time Ghostscript libraries are not updated.

As we can find in the historically Ghostscript site
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

we can see
GPL Ghostscript
---------------
    * GPL Ghostscript 8.64 released 2009-02-03
    * GPL Ghostscript 8.63 released 2008-08-01
    * GPL Ghostscript 8.62 released 2008-02-29
    * GPL Ghostscript 8.61 released 2007-11-21 

Could you update the library in the main stream and/or in the "Printing" repo
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Printing/
?

Thank you very much.

Carlo

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Dr. Werner Fink 2009-06-05 12:06:43 UTC
So waht?  Any news about new features?
Comment 2 Carlo Strata 2009-06-05 16:36:37 UTC
Hi Werner,

to answer your question, I report to you only the "headers" of the 8.64 and 8.63 releases changelogs from the file

./doc/History8.htm

you can find decompressing the ghostscript-8.64.tar.bz2 file that you can download from

http://ghostscript.com/GPL_Ghostscript_8.64.html

I will next put History8.htm file as attachment to this issue.

So that read this two sections:

------------------------------------------------------
Version 8.64 (2009-02-02)

This is the fifth scheduled release in the stable Ghostscript 8.6x series.

Approximately 100 bugs have been fixed since the 8.63 release.

Of particular note in this release are improvements to overprint and spot color support in documents with transparency, improvements to PDF and PS output, proper handling of PDF-specific text rendering modes and support for reading AES-encrypted PDF documents.

Also improved is handling of CJK text, especially in vertical writing modes, memory footprint processing some files at high resolution and support for using the system's default paper size on unix.

The interpreter's handling of color spaces has been moved from PostScript code to C.

A number of the included printer drivers and cups wrappers have been updated to support a PDF-based workflow. Also fixed are several long-standing bugs in the pcl drivers with respect to duplex, resolution and paper tray selection. 


------------------------------------------------------
Version 8.63 (2008-08-01)

This is the fourth scheduled release in the stable Ghostscipt 8.6x series. It corresponds to the 1.53 release of GhostPDL.

Approximately 238 bugs have been fixed since version 8.62. Of particular note are robustness and performance improvements with large files, invalid PDF, and font handling.

The major new feature of this release is multithreaded rendering. This can be requested by passing -dNumRenderingThreads=n on the command line. The input document is first parsed, and then each page is split into n bands which are rendered concurrently. This can provide a significant reduction in processing time on multi-core systems.

Images are now always interpolated in their source colorspace. This improves correctness for XPS documents and avoids bypassing the custom color management callbacks for interpolated images. Interpolation and color management are both expensive operations, so this affects performance with large images. The effect can be positive or negative depending on the file and the target resolution. If performance is a problem, we suggest running with -dNOINTERPOLATION.

Support for OpenPrinting Vector devices has been upgraded to version 1.0.

There are two new devices in this release, both experimental. Behdad Esfahbod has contributed a cairo output device which uses the cairo graphics library to generate PDF, SVG, EPS, or PNG files, based on the requested filename extension. The svgwrite device directly outputs Scalable Vector Graphics, the W3C XML vector graphics format. Both support only vector art at this point; text and images will not be represented efficiently.

------------------------------------------------------

Furthermore I use the excellent GPL printer "driver"
http://foo2qpdl.rkkda.com/

that is ghostscript based (see the simple schema in the home page) to print on my Samsung CLP-610ND, to which I made some bugfix contribution to the autor (duplex support, ...). So I wanto to obtain the maximum from it.

Hope can help,

Carlo

p.s. [OTs]

- The QPDL driver an alternative to the classic Splix (SPL driver) that you can find here
http://splix.ap2c.org/

- the new 0.9.8 version of the famous gpl virtual pdf printer for Windows PdfCreator
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator

updated to ghostscript 8.64, too!!!
Comment 3 Carlo Strata 2009-06-05 16:39:11 UTC
Created attachment 296567 [details]
Change log history file, version 8.x related
Comment 4 Dr. Werner Fink 2009-06-26 16:16:29 UTC
done for openSUSE 11.2
Comment 5 Carlo Strata 2009-06-28 14:03:45 UTC
... and done for build service too:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Printing:/ghostscript/

for current and some previous OpenSuSE versions.

Thank you very much! ;-)

I have upgraded just now!

Carlo