Ghostscript
An interpreter for the PostScript and PDF languages.
Ghostscript reads PostScript and PDF and converts between formats, rasterises pages for printing, and is widely used as the back-end for CUPS-based printing on Linux and macOS. The gs command-line tool can extract text, render pages to PNG/JPEG, re-encode PDFs at lower resolution, embed fonts, and many other operations.
The project began in 1986 as L. Peter Deutsch's free implementation of PostScript; Artifex Software has stewarded it commercially since the 1990s. Ghostscript is dual-licensed: an AGPL-3.0 community release and a commercial licence for embedding into proprietary products.
Ghostscript is the rendering engine behind a substantial fraction of Linux PDF tooling: pdftoppm, pdfinfo, ImageMagick's PDF input, GIMP's PDF importer, and many others all delegate to it. CUPS uses Ghostscript to convert PostScript print jobs into the raster format the destination printer expects.
License: AGPL-3.0-or-later (community) / commercial
Category: Office
Website: https://www.ghostscript.com/
Install
Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install ghostscript Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install ghostscript Arch: sudo pacman -S ghostscript macOS: brew install ghostscript
Authors
- Artifex Software