[pdftex] Ghostscript 6.50 available

[Tobias Burnus]

Hi,

there has been no formal announcement yet (and the last change to the
GS_6_5 CVS branch on sourceforge was 2000/12/05 09:39:48 whereas the
release data according sourceforge is 2000/12/04!) --- but on
http://www.ghostscript.com/article/4.html is now the offical
announcement:
------------------------
AFPL Ghostscript 6.50 official release 
Posted 5 Dec 2000 by raph

artofcode LLC, Aladdin Enterprises, and Artifex Software Inc. are
pleased to announce the release of AFPL Ghostscript version 6.50. This
is primarily a maintenance release from the 6.01 public release from the
beginning of this year. It supersedes both AFPL Ghostscript 6.01 and the
Artifex supported OEM version 6.12. In addition to a number of bug
fixes, there have been major improvements to PDFwrite output driver and
its underlying high level output API. 

This is the first release since artofcode LLC has taken over leadership
of the future development and enhancement of Ghostscript. Ghostscript
6.50 has undergone rigorous testing and we are confident that 6.50 will
provide a reliable contribution to the PDF and PostScript communities.

Downloads are available from
[http://SourceForge.net/projects/ghostscript/] and
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu. 

If you noticed the files available and downloaded them before the
official release, you may have gotten a version with a memory leak. The
correct file sizes are: 

       ghostscript-6.50.tar.bz2 3643576
       ghostscript-6.50.tar.gz 4240377 

Thanks to everybody in the Ghostscript community for helping with this
release. It's certainly taken more of my time and energy than I
expected.Now that it's shipping, I'll be able to turn my energies toward
future development. I look forward to working more closely with all of
you in that regard. 
------------------------

What is new? Well besides a security fix for UNIX (see bugtraq and
sourceforge page) there is mainly updates in the area of ps2pdf (this is
not an official list):
- All Distiller options are now recognised and a lot of them are
honoured (Ps2pdf.htm)
- The support of PDF 1.3 (and PDF 1.4 for transparency although there is
no specification; Adobe Illustrator uses this) and PostScript Level 3
has been improved (including colour space and CID-fonts).
- The ps2pdf converter's font inclusion support has been enhanced
- Aladdin's Ghostscript is now AFPL ghostsciript
- lots of smaller bugs
- reorganisation of the file

What the future will bring:
- A gs.dll/libgs.so will appear so that linking programs to
ghostscript's library will be possible
- PSWriter (ps2ps, pdf2ps) will be brought to the quality of pdfwriter

What else is greate:
- After the Aladdin version appeared the next GNU version was released.
Thus we will see a GNU Ghoscript 6.01 soon.

Tobias
-- 
This above all: To thine own self be true / And it must follow as
the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man.