IMPORTANT: It is our intention, within the next 12 months (ideally sooner, in time for the next release) to make SAFER the default mode of operation. For many users this will have no effect, since they use SAFER explicitly, but some niche uses which rely on SAFER being disabled may need to start explicitly adding the "-dNOSAFER" option.
Highlights in this release include:
We have extensively cleaned up the Postscript name space: removing access to internal and/or undocumented Postscript operators, procedures and data. This has benefits for security and maintainability.
We have added a new "product": "gpdl". This is a rethink/redesign of the old "language_switch" product (pspcl6), and includes all the interpreters we develop based on the Ghostscript graphics library: Postscript, PDF, PCL6, PXL and XPS. This is experimental, and should be considered of beta testing quality, and thus is not built by default: it can be built by using the "experimental" target.
gpdl uses a heuristic to judge the file type being passed to it. In general, it supports most of the widely used command line options for each interpreter, but compatibility is not complete (the practicalities of swapping interpreters means it is unlikely that full parity of command line options will be possible).
Fontmap can now reference invidual fonts in a TrueType Collection for font subsitution. Previously, a Fontmap entry could only reference a TrueType collection and use the default (first) font. Now, the Fontmap syntax allows for specifying a specific index in a TTC. See the comments at the top of (the default) Fontmap.GS for details.
IMPORTANT: We are in the process of forking LittleCMS. LCMS2 is not thread safe, and cannot be made thread safe without breaking the ABI. Our fork will be thread safe, and include performance enhancements (these changes have all be been offered and rejected upstream). We will maintain compatibility between Ghostscript and LCMS2 for a time, but not in perpetuity. Our fork will be available as its own package separately from Ghostscript (and MuPDF).
The usual round of bug fixes, compatibility changes, and incremental improvements.
For a list of open issues, or to report problems, please visit bugs.ghostscript.com.
Incompatible changes
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.
One case we know this has occurred is GSView 5 (and earlier). GSView 5 support for PDF files relied upon internal use only features which are no longer available. GSView 5 will still work as previously for Postscript files. For PDF files, users are encouraged to look at MuPDF.
Version 9.27 (2019-04-04)
Incompatible changes