<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> <title>Ghostscript – Black Box Magic</title> </head> <body> <h2>Ghostscript – Black Box Magic</h2> <h3>What is Ghostscript?</h3> <p>For those not familiar, <a href="http://www.ghostscript.com/">Ghostscript (gs)</a>, strictly defined, is a so-called “PostScript interpreter”, and many programs use <code>gs</code> for PostScript conversions and import/export. Ghostscript has become one of the core building blocks of OSS software. It would be hard to imagine modern OSS distributions and software without it.</p> <p>Likewise, Scribus uses Ghostscript, sometimes taking advantage of the most sophisticated features that are available only in the latest versions. Scribus uses <code>gs</code> for two purposes, the first one being the import of rasterized <a href="importhints1.html">EPS files</a> into <a href="WwImages.html">image frames</a>. The second feature that requires <code>gs</code> is the <a href="print2.html">Print Preview</a>.</p> <p>We always encourage you to have the latest Ghostscript available for your system.</p> <h3>Installing Ghostscript</h3> <h4>Linux/UNIX</h4> <p>As mentioned above, Ghostscript is required by many applications. Thus, it’s unlikely that it isn’t installed on your system. If, for any reason, <code>gs</code> isn’t available on your system or your system is being shipped with a version that’s too old (you should at least use Ghostscript 8.6 with Scribus), you can <a href="http://ghostscript.com/releases/">download</a> a tarball from the <code>gs</code> website. Be careful to download Ghostscript itself, not ghostpdl, whose source code is in the same directory. Then follow the build instructions in the tarball and install it.</p> <h4>Windows</h4> <p> See the <a href="readme-win32.html">general information</a> about Scribus on Windows for further details.</p> <h4>Mac OS X</h4> <p>There are different ways to install Ghostscript for Mac OS X, but unfortunately, none of them seems to be as easy as most Mac users are used to:</p> <ul> <li>You can download a <a href="http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/Ghostscript-8.71.pkg.zip">ZIP archive</a> with four DMGs of <code>gs</code> for various OS X versions. Please read the related <a href="http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/Ghostscript-8.71.pdf">info file</a> to decide which version you need.</li> <li>You can install <code>gs</code> via <a href="http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/ghostscript">Fink</a>.</li> <li>The most current releases of Ghostscript are always available via <a href="http://www.macports.org/ports.php?by=library&substr=ghostscript">MacPorts</a>.</li> <li>Finally, you can, of course, download the latest <a href="http://ghostscript.com/releases/">source code</a> and compile Ghostscript yourself.</li> </ul> <h4>OS/2 and eComStation</h4> <p> See the <a href="readme-os2.html">general information</a> about Scribus on OS/2 for further details.</p> </body> </html>
