Copyright (C) 1990, 1995, 1996, 1997 Aladdin Enterprises. All rights reserved. This file is part of Aladdin Ghostscript. Aladdin Ghostscript is distributed with NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. No author or distributor accepts any responsibility for the consequences of using it, or for whether it serves any particular purpose or works at all, unless he or she says so in writing. Refer to the Aladdin Ghostscript Free Public License (the "License") for full details. Every copy of Aladdin Ghostscript must include a copy of the License, normally in a plain ASCII text file named PUBLIC. The License grants you the right to copy, modify and redistribute Aladdin Ghostscript, but only under certain conditions described in the License. Among other things, the License requires that the copyright notice and this notice be preserved on all copies. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - This file, current.txt, describes problems and new features in the current release of Ghostscript. This file describes version 5.03 of Ghostscript. For an overview of Ghostscript and a list of the documentation files, see README. New features (since release 4.03) ============ (This is not a complete list of new features: see NEWS for details.) PDF 1.2 (the file format from Acrobat 3.0) is now supported, except for Type 0 (Japanese/Chinese/Korean) embedded fonts. NOTE: This requires an updated version of the decryption patch. See pdf_sec.ps for details. Local VM garbage collection (1 vmreclaim) is now implemented. CIDFonts and CMap-keyed composite fonts are now supported, except that rearranged fonts, and CMap-keyed composite fonts whose descendant fonts are themselves composite, are not implemented. PDF compressed fonts (CFF) are now supported, except that Multiple Master fonts and CID fonts are not yet implemented in this format. The FontResourceDir, GenericResourceDir, and GenericResourcePathSep system parameters, and ResourceFileName for the built-in resource categories, are now supported, for Adobe-compatible accessing of file-based resources. Building with GNU make on OpenVMS is now supported. (We will probably drop the DCL scripts in the next release.) Building with Microsoft Visual C++ (versions 4.n and 5.n), for 32-bit MS Windows environments, is now supported. If you include the optional epsf.dev feature at compile time, the interpreter will recognize and handle MS-DOS EPSF files with a binary header (by skipping the header and only processing the PostScript part). The fileset now contains (but doesn't normally use) gcc-compatible floating point emulation code, for use on systems that don't have floating point hardware. RAM- rather than file-based band lists, normally using deflate (zlib) compression, are now supported. The PDF writer now recognizes all Distiller 3.0 parameters, although most of them don't have any effect. The pstoppm.ps script has been removed, since the p*m drivers supersede it. New drivers: Displays: ali - SuperVGA displays using the Avance Logic chipset Printers: lp8000 - Epson LP-8000 laser printer pxlmono - Black-and-white PCL XL (LaserJet 5 & 6) pxlcolor - Color PCL XL (future color LaserJets) uniprint - A new driver for many color inkjets, see devices.txt Raster file formats: jpeg - JPEG (.jpg) files pcxcmyk - 4-bit PCX using CMYK color psgray - 8-bit gray PostScript (Level 1) bitmap images High-level file formats: epswrite - High-level EPS "distiller" pswrite - High-level PostScript "distiller" Changes ======= There have been no significant user-visible changes. Known problems ============== (This is not a complete list of known problems: see NEWS for details.) Usage ----- On a MS-DOS system, interrupting the interpreter by typing ^C doesn't restore the display mode. Limitations ----------- serialnumber returns the same value in all copies. User names (a Display PostScript facility) are not implemented. Some floating point exceptions terminate the interpreter, rather than producing a limitcheck error. The DCTEncode filter disregards the Blend parameter, and uses different QuantTables and HuffTables from Adobe's. The DCT filters do not support nonintegral sample ratios. Also, DCTEncode will not create files with Sum(HS*VS)>10 (regardless of the value of the Relax parameter) because they violate the JPEG standard; but DCTDecode will read such files. The size of the execution stack cannot be changed dynamically. (However, the sizes of the operand and dictionary stacks can be changed.) Separation color spaces are implemented, but devices that actually produce color separations are not supported. The special color separations All and None, and the primary separations (Red, Green, etc.), are not supported. execform and ucache are implemented, but they do not actually do any caching; setucacheparams and ucachestatus are dummies. (This only impacts performance, not functionality.) The image operator only honors the Interpolate flag in the image dictionary if the combined transformation (ImageMatrix + CTM) doesn't involve rotation, skewing, or X-reflection; imagemask doesn't honor Interpolate at all. Some path building operations that would generate a device coordinate larger than +/-2^19 will cause a limitcheck. However, the common ones ([r]moveto, [r]lineto, [r]curveto, closepath) will not. Graphics bugs ------------- Opening more than one window device at the same time doesn't work. This is the case for both X Windows and Microsoft Windows. cshow doesn't work with composite fonts. Non-graphics bugs ----------------- The %statementedit pseudo-file is equivalent to %lineedit. As a consequence, the interactive interpreter requires that every statement fit on a line, i.e., you can't have an unpaired (, {, or <. The following operators that expect arrays won't accept packed arrays: definefont (Subrs (type 1 fonts)) Syntax errors occurring within a binary token do not produce the error message specified by the Adobe documentation. save doesn't save, and restore doesn't restore, the user parameters.