Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript page description language used by laser printers. It is used for PostScript/PDF preview and printing. Usually as a back-end to a program such as Ghostview, it can display PostScript and PDF documents in an X11 environment.
Ghostscript can be used as a raster image processor (RIP) for raster computer printers; for instance, as an input filter of line printer daemon, or as the RIP engine behind PostScript and PDF viewers.
Supported printers include common dot-matrix, inkjet and laser models.
There are a number of user friendly graphical interfaces available for Ghostscript including Ghostview, GSview, GV and MGv.
Key Features
- Use as a raster image processor.
- File format converter such as PostScript to PDF converter.
- Used as a general purpose programming environment.
- Ghostscript library, a set of procedures to implement the graphics and filtering capabilities that are primitive operations in the PostScript language and in PDF.
Website: www.ghostscript.com
Support: Blog
Developer: Artifex Software
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Ghostscript is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| PDF Tools | |
|---|---|
| Scribus | Desktop page layout software producing commercial grade PDF output |
| ONLYOFFICE | Cloud online office suite with great PDF functionality |
| LibreOffice Draw | Vector graphics editor and diagramming tool that can create PDFs |
| PDFBox | Java tool for working with PDF documents |
| Ghostscript | Ghostscript PostScript / PDF interpreter |
| Dangerzone | Make PDFs safe |
| pdf-compress | Compress an overly large PDF file to smaller monochrome |
| PoDoFo | Easy to use PDF parsing and creation library |
| veraPDF | Industry supported PDF/A validation |
| pdfgrep | Command-line utility to search text in PDF files |
| Rescribe | Desktop tool for performing OCR |
| PDF4QT | PDF editor |
| Scans to PDF | Create small, searchable PDFs from scanned documents |
| Paper Clip | Edit PDF document metadata |
| pdfposter | Print large posters on multiple sheets |
| plakativ | Stretches PDF or raster image across multiple pages |
| PDF Metadata Editor | Simple GUI tool |
| unlockR | Simple tool to decrypt PDF files |
| pdfresurrect | Analyze PDF documents |
| Densify | Compress PDF files using Ghostscript |
| IceBox | Converts images into a PDF file |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |