GhostPDF
Artifex's GhostPDF™ software is technology for manipulation and rasterization of PDF documents, developed by Artifex Software, purveyors of Ghostscript® and GhostPCL™ the fine, popular and complete software solutions for handling and conversion of Page Description Language documents.
This page documents the next-generation version of the GhostPDF software. This new release will be an entirely new codebase written from the ground up to take maximum advantage of modern computer architectures.
Feature highlights:
- Clean implementation of PDF parsing in the C language (codename mupdf)
- Handling of advanced PDF 1.6 features
- Memory efficient tree-based internal representation of graphic contents for quick editing and modularization
- Revolutionary new graphics library performs very fast, very high quality antialiased rasterization of the PDF imaging model (codename fitz)
- Prototype renders PDF documents 5 times faster than Ghostscript.
This new version of the GhostPDF software is under development, but snapshots of this exciting new product are available for trial. Try one of the binaries below for a demonstration of the speed and quality this new product will offer.
Windows binary ghostpdf-win32-0.1.zip 1.4 MB source ghostpdf-0.1.tar.gz 457 KB Firefox plugin available for Windows Development dailies are also available
The snapshot includes the following example applications:
- ghostpdf a pdf viewer
- pdfclean for fixing broken pdf files and changing permissions
- pdfmerge and pdfselect for merging and extracting individual pages
- pdfdebug developer tool for peeking inside a pdf document
- pdfrip for batch rendering to a ppm raster file
Note that these are a technology demonstration and not full-featured applications.
Because integration and code quality are important to our OEM customers, the source code is also available for review and evaluation under the AFPL license, which allows source modification in kind but not commercial distribution.
The lastest development source is available directly from the repository. If you don't find the web access convenient you can use the Free darcs version control software to check out the latest version from the link above. You will also need the Jam build tool to compile the source.
While this exciting new version is under development we cannot recommend it for production work. For a stable alternative, we refer you to our mature releases based on the Ghostscript family of products.