Recent Changes in Ghostscript

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Changes in the Most Recent Release of Ghostscript

This document is news about the most recent Ghostscript release. For earlier versions, see the history documents:

> History of Ghostscript versions 9.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 8.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 7.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 6.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 5.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 4.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 3.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 2.n
> History of Ghostscript versions 1.n

For other information, see the Ghostscript overview.

## Version 9.54.0 (2021-03-30)

The 9.54.0 release is a maintenance release, and also adds new functionality.

Highlights in this release include:

- Overprint simulation is now available to all output devices, allowing quality previewing/proofing of PostScript and PDF jobs that rely on overprint. See the `-dOverprint` option documentation in: Overprint

- The "docxwrite" device adds the ability to output to Microsoft Word "docx" format. See: docxwrite

- The pdfwrite device is now capable of using the Tesseract OCR engine when it is built into Ghostscript to improve searchability and copy and paste functionality when the input lacks the metadata for that purpose. See: UseOCR

- Ghostscript/GhostPDL now includes a "map text to black" function, where text drawn by an input job (except when drawn using a Type 3 font) can be forced to draw in solid black. See: BlackText

- Ghostscript/GhostPDL now supports simple N-up imposition "internally". See: NupControl

- Our efforts in code hygiene and maintainability continue.

- The usual round of bug fixes, compatibility changes, and incremental improvements.

- (9.53.0) We have added the capability to build with the Tesseract OCR engine. In such a build, new devices are available (pdfocr8/pdfocr24/pdfocr32) which render the output file to an image, OCR that image, and output the image "wrapped" up as a PDF file, with the OCR generated text information included as "invisible" text (in PDF terms, text rendering mode 3).

  Mainly due to time constraints, we only support including Tesseract from source included in our release packages, and not linking to Tesseract/Leptonica shared libraries. Whether we add this capability will be largely dependent on community demand for the feature.

  See Enabling OCR for more details.

For a list of open issues, or to report problems, please visit bugs.ghostscript.com.

### Incompatible changes

#### Included below are incompatible changes from recent releases (the specific release in question listed in parentheses). We include these, for now, as we are aware that not everyone upgrades with every release.

- (9.53.0) As of 9.53.0, we have (re-)introduced the patch level to the version number, this helps facilitate a revised policy on handling security related issues.

  Note for GSView Users:The patch level addition breaks GSView 5 (it is hardcoded to check for versions `704-999`. It is possible, but not guaranteed that a GSView update might be forthcoming to resolve this.

- (9.52) As of 9.52, the Windows binaries released by the Ghostscript development team are built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019. As a result, Microsoft Windows XP and earlier are no longer supported by these binaries. This does not imply we are, or will start relying upon features only available in VS2019, so the `nmake` Makefiles will continue to allow older Visual Studio versions (back to VS2005) to build Ghostscript.

- (9.52) `-dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY`: The transparency compositor (and related features), whilst we are improving it, remains sensitive to being driven correctly, and incorrect use can have unexpected/undefined results. Hence, as part of improving security we limited access to these operators, originally using the `-dSAFER` feature. As we made "SAFER" the default mode, that became unacceptable, hence the new option `-dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY` which enables access to the operators.

- (9.50) There are a couple of subtle incompatibilities between the old and new SAFER implementations. Firstly, as mentioned in the 9.50 release notes, SAFER now leaves standard Postcript functionality unchanged (except for the file access limitations). Secondly, the interaction with `save`/`restore` operations, see SAFER.

  Important Note for Windows Users:
  The file/path pattern matching is case sensitive, even on Windows. This is a change in behaviour compared to the old code which, on Windows, was case insensitive. This is in recognition of changes in Windows behaviour, in that it now supports (although does not enforce) case sensitivity.

- (9.27) The process of "tidying" the PostScript name space should have removed only non-standard and undocumented operators. Nevertheless, it is possible that any integrations or utilities that rely on those non-standard and undocumented operators may stop working or may change behaviour.

  If you encounter such a case, please contact us (either the #ghostscript IRC channel, or the gs-devel mailing list would be best), and we'll work with you to either find an alternative solution or return the previous functionality, if there is genuinely no other option.

### Changelog

See the history file for complete log of changes.

Copyright © 2005-2021 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

This software is provided AS-IS with no warranty, either express or implied. This software is distributed under license and may not be copied, modified or distributed except as expressly authorized under the terms of that license. Refer to licensing information at https://www.artifex.com or contact Artifex Software, Inc., 1305 Grant Avenue - Suite 200, Novato, CA 94945, U.S.A., +1(415)492-9861, for further information.

Ghostscript version 9.54.0, 30 March 2021