AFPL Ghostscript 8.10 beta

Artifex Software, Inc and artofcode LLC are pleased to announce the availability of Ghostscript 8.10 beta. The 8.10 beta release is an incremental release from 8.00. It contains some fairly substantial reworking of important modules, most notably in the font rendering. Because of the extent of the changes, we're labelling this as a beta release. It should be quite usable, but it hasn't been as thoroughly wrung out as our production releases.

The major new feature improved font rendering by Igor Melichev. The new font renderer prevents dropouts intelligently rather than relying on "fill_adjust" (which has the side effect of making the font bolder).

In addition, pdfwrite continues to evolve and improve. Most patterns and type 3 fonts are now output as high-level objects rather than being rasterized.

This is our first release with support for JBIG2 encoded images, using our jbig2dec library. This decoder is not yet complete, but successfully decodes many PDF files containing JBIG2 images.

This release also contains an important security fix. If you are using Ghostscript in a security-critical application, we recommend you upgrade now.

Finally, we include the usual bug fixes and improvements. Please exercise this release thoroughly, so we can make the next release rock-solid.

Ghostscript 8.10 beta is available from mirror.cs.wisc.edu and sourceforge.net.

Please see Obtaining AFPL Ghostscript 8.10 beta for more details.