Recent changes in Ghostscript

# 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 9.n
> 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 9.23 (2018-03-21)

This is the seventeenth full release in the stable 9.x series.

Highlights in this release include:

- Ghostscript now has a family of 'pdfimage' devices (pdfimage8, pdfimage24 and pdfimage32) which produce rendered output wrapped up as an image in a PDF. Additionally, there is a 'pclm' device which produces PCLm format output.

- There is now a ColorAccuracy parameter allowing the user to decide between speed or accuracy in ICC color transforms.

- JPEG Passthrough: devices which support it can now receive the 'raw' JPEG stream from the interpreter. The main use of this is the pdfwrite/ps2write family of devices that can now take JPEG streams from the input file(s) and write them unchanged to the output (thus avoiding additional quantization effects).

- PDF transparency performance improvements

- 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).

- We have continued the focus on code hygiene in this release cleaning up security issues, ignored return values, and compiler warnings.

- 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 planned device API tidy has, unfortunately, been indefinitely postponed, until appropriate resources are available.

### Changelog

See the history file for complete log of changes.

Copyright © 2005-2018 Artifex Software, Inc. 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 that license. Refer to licensing information at http://www.artifex.com/ or contact Artifex Software, Inc., 1305 Grant Avenue - Suite 200, Novato, CA 94945, U.S.A., +1(415)492-9861, for further information.

Ghostscript version 9.23, 21 March 2018