# 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 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 8.50 (2004-12-10)

This is the first release in the new stable series of Ghostscript. In addition to many bug fixes it contains numerous new features. Most obvious will be improved font handling and rasterization, and better support for PDF 1.4 and 1.5 documents.

New features since the last stable release:

- Topological grid fitting, an original method developed for Ghostscript by Dr. Igor V. Melichev, improves the rendering of True Type fonts at small resolutions. See the documentation for GridFitTT for information on this feature.

- The PDF writer now implements PDF 1.4 encryption. See the encryption parameter documentation for more information.

- A new rendering method for shadings, developed for Ghostscript by Dr. Igor V. Melichev, improves the quality and performance of rasterization on continuous tone devices. The new method allows hardware or software acceleration with help of customizable routines for filling areas with a linearly varying color. functions.

- Better support for running Ghostscript in "Job Server" mode as a daemon to continually accept and convert a series of independent files.

- Also new is the Rinkj deivce, an experimental new driver for some inkjet printers using ETS screening and color profiles to achieve very high quality output for tuned output. See the Rinkj section for more information.

- We now support PDF 1.5 files, including the new compression and encryption modes.

- We have beta support for JPEG 2000 compressed images, using the JasPer compression library. In this release this support is only enabled as in the default autoconf (POSIX) and MSVC builds.

This release also has major internal improvements toward thread safety, although we have not yet reached this goal. Nevertheless Ghostscript should be more robust when used as a library, and these changes were an important precursor to complete virtualization.

The following bug numbers were open at the time of this release:

> 405501, 430175, 446344, 458780, 463688, 465936, 487953, 493348, 526099, 526491, 530011, 535366, 535932, 578865, 592160, 603934, 610478, 614298, 626295, 674418, 677324, 685335, 686747, 686750, 686816, 686819, 686824, 686841, 686842, 686843, 686853, 686865, 686867, 686919, 686980, 686996, 687011, 687012, 687013, 687039, 687059, 687063, 687084, 687086, 687095, 687105, 687108, 687110, 687122, 687125, 687146, 687168, 687174, 687193, 687196, 687203, 687219, 687221, 687229, 687231, 687243, 687251, 687257, 687259, 687271, 687280, 687295, 687297, 687298, 687303, 687314, 687316, 687324, 687327, 687341, 687342, 687345, 687346, 687360, 687373, 687375, 687394, 687397, 687399, 687401, 687410, 687414, 687434, 687435, 687445, 687460, 687468, 687473, 687474, 687475, 687480, 687484, 687485, 687492, 687497, 687498, 687514, 687518, 687520, 687523, 687525, 687529, 687531, 687535, 687536, 687537, 687539, 687541, 687545, 687551, 687558, 687559, 687560, 687561, 687583, 687593, 687595, 687600, 687608, 687611, 687621, 687622, 687628, 687630, 687633, 687642, 687643, 687644, 687650, 687654, 687657, 687661, 687663, 687666, 687669, 687674, 687676, 687677, 687678, 687679, 687680, 687682, 687684, 687686, 687694, 687695, 687696, 687697, 687702, 687707, 687712, 687715, 687717, 687721, 687727, 687728, 687729, 687731, 687735, 687738, 687754, 687756, 687769, 687772, 687775, 687778, 687780, 687782, 687783, 687786, 687791, 687793, 687795, 687796, 687800, 687802, 687803, 687805, 687806, 687808, 687809, 687813, 687814, 687815, 687816, 687820, 687822, 687823, 687825, 687826, 687827, 687828, 687830, 687831, 687832, 687834, 687835, 687836, 687837, 687838, 687840, 687842, 687843, 687844, 687845, 687846, 687847, 687848, 687849.

### Incompatible changes

No incompatible changes at this point

Copyright © 2004 artofcode LLC. 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 the license contained in the file LICENSE in this distribution. For more information about licensing, please refer to http://www.ghostscript.com/licensing/. For information on commercial licensing, go to http://www.artifex.com/licensing/ or contact Artifex Software, Inc., 101 Lucas Valley Road #110, San Rafael, CA 94903, U.S.A., +1(415)492-9861.

Ghostscript version 8.50, 10 December 2004