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Version 9.06 (2012-07-31)

This is the sixth full release in the stable 9.x series.

Highlights in this release include:

  * PDF/A-2 - pdfwrite now supports the creation of PDF/A-2 files. The 'PDFA'
    command line switch can now take a numeric parameter:
      + 0 = not PDF/A compliant
      + 1 = PDF/A-1b compliant
      + 2 = PDF/A-2b compliant

    Simply specifying "-dPDFA" continues to have the old behaviour of creating
    PDF/A-1b files. For PDF/A-2 the command line should include "-dPDFA=2".
  * pdfwrite "Server mode" - pdfwrite can now be run in "server mode" which
    allows the device to be closed without closing the interpreter. This means
    it is no longer necessary to terminate GS before starting a new PDF
    conversion. This leads on to:
  * pdfwrite now supports the "%d" format in the OutputFile switch. If this is
    set then pdfwrite will output each page of input to an individual file.
  * ps2write - recent exposure to a range of PostScript devices has thrown up
    some interesting deficiencies in those devices. ps2write now emits
    PostScript in slightly different ways in order to produce output on a wider
    variety of devices. In some cases this also results in improved print times
    but it is still important to set the resolution appropriately for the
    output device, especially if the input contains transparency.
  * Ghostscript can now use output intents defined in PDFs by using the
    "-dUsePDFX3Profile" command line option. See ICC Color Parameters for
    details.
  * tiffsep/tiffsep1: support for large numbers of separations improved. The
    previous implementation of those devices utilised a "compressed color
    encoding" to represent the tints for all the plates in one 64 bit value. As
    the number of plates increased, fewer bits were available for the tint for
    each plate, ultimately resulting in an "unencodable pixels" error. These
    revisions remove the reliance on the compressed color encoding, thus
    ensuring that we have a consistent color bit depth, regardless of the
    number of plates, and ensuring the "unencodable pixels" error will never
    occur.

    Also as a result of these changes, there are substantial performance
    improvements in jobs with separations and transparency.
  * tiffsep, psdcmyk and psdrgb now support the "downscaler" functionality.
    This brings the "tiffscaled" style functionality to the DeviceN output
    devices, so jobs can be rendered internally in contone and at a high
    resolution, and the output optionally downsampled by a level specified by
    "-dDownScaleFactor=n", and also optionally error diffused to 1bpp output.
  * Third party libraries: libtiff, libpng, libjpeg , Freetype and zlib have
    all be updated.
  * clist storage, for rendering pages in bands, is now a run-time option:
    -sBandListStorage={file|memory}.
  * Plus the usual round of bug fixes, compatibility changes, and incremental
    improvements.

In addition, Ghostscript and GhostPDL 8.71 are now unsupported, and those still
using those versions (or earlier ones) should migrate to 9.x as soon as
possible since many improvements, features and fixes from the 9.x versions are
impractical or impossible to back-port to these legacy versions.

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

Incompatible changes

No recorded incompatible changes.