GPL Ghostscript 8.71

Artifex Software is happy to announce a new stable release of GPL Ghostscript and GhostPDL.

This is the second release in the stable Ghostscript 8.7x series. The corresponding GhostPDL release is 8.71.

Source packages are available from:

• http://ghostscript.com/releases/ghostscript-8.71.tar.gz
• http://ghostscript.com/releases/ghostscript-8.71.tar.xz
• http://ghostscript.com/releases/ghostpdl-8.71.tar.bz2

And from the following mirrors:

• http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs871/
• http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/ghostpdl/
• http://code.google.com/p/ghostscript/downloads/list
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostscript/files/GPL%20Ghostscript/8.71/

SHA-1 checksums:

MD5 checksums:

• 51a522a5b4818bd3dc7c1c0e9dd22bad ghostscript-8.71.tar.gz
• 5005d68f7395c2bfc4b05c1a60d9b6ba ghostscript-8.71.tar.xz
• adaaeb286fa7e56174bf1d7221436ef1 ghostscript-8.71-macosx.tar.gz
• c815b2079e5aa322f517fcbac3036552 gs871w32.exe
• 2eda79feba142b549e0ab037cfae772a gs871w64.exe

New in this release is an experimental project file for Microsoft Visual Studio. This wraps the normal nmake build, and makes it easier for developers to get started building Ghostscript with that compiler.

Support for tiff file output is now provided using the libtiff implementation rather than our more limited native code as in previous releases. There is also a new 'tiffsep1' output device which produces halftoned separations at 1 bit-per-pixel, in contrast to the 'tiffsep' device which produces 8 bit-per-pixel plates.

Support for using FreeType as a type rasterizer has been greatly improved. We do not recommend its use as of this release, but it is much more functional than previously and our intent is that it will become the default in a future release.

The graphics library has been updated to provide more accurate scan conversion of vector art including fixes to dash behavior, transparent stroked paths, thick stroked paths, radial shadings, xps cap handling, "pie" joins, degenerate beziers, improved handling of dropouts in thin strokes and better thin axis-aligned strokes.

Thanks to everyone whose hard work made this release possible!

Post-release news

After you get this version of Ghostscript, we suggest that you track news, updates, and fixes here or at the Ghostscript website, ghostscript.com.

Microsoft Windows

You will need to obtain and run the self-extracting EXE

gs871w32.exe, GPL Ghostscript 8.71 for 32-bit Windows (the common variety).
gs871w64.exe, GPL Ghostscript 8.71 for 64-bit Windows (x86_64).

GSview

If using MS-Windows it is strongly recommended that you also get GSview, which provides a graphical interface to Ghostscript.

To unpack ZIP files, you will need an unzip program such as Info-ZIP unzip.