• Version: 8.00
• Summary: A PostScript interpreter that renders into PDF and a ton of image formats.

Prerequisites

• Jpeg Library (see BuildingLibJpeg)
• PNG Library (see BuildingLibPng)
• Zlib library (see BuildingZlib)

Obtaining

Consult http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ for the latest version of Ghostscript. After considering the licensing issue, I've chosen to install the AFPL version of Ghostscript. At the time this topic was written, version 8.00 was current.

   cd /cis/src/text
   <... download ghostscript-8.00.tar.bz2 ...>
   bzip2 -dc ghostscript-8.00.tar.bz2 |tar xf -
   cd ghostscript-8.00

Solaris

Edit the configure file, and look around line 5359 for a LIBS setting that adds -lpng. Add -lz right after the -lpng. Without this, the configure script won't be able to test the PNG library, which depends on the zlib.

Edit Makefile.in, and change both instances of -O2 in compiler option lines to just the -O option. It's silly that they forgot to tie that into CFLAGS.

Their configure scripts and *.in files aren't quite normal; hence, even after specifying CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS, you'll still need to set other variables for the make. Don't try a parallel job make, it'll cause problems.

   CC='cc -xtarget=ultra' CFLAGS=-O \
      CPPFLAGS=-I/cis/include LDFLAGS='-L/cis/lib -R/cis/lib' \
      ./configure --prefix=/cis
   gmake XCFLAGS=-I/cis/include XLDFLAGS='-L/cis/lib -R/cis/lib'

Fonts

There is a good quality set of "workalike" fonts for Ghostscript that support the traditional PostScript^? fonts (Times, Helvetica, Palatino, etc). They haven't changed since Ghostscript version 6.00; no need for them to change, really, since they're just fonts. If you're upgrading an existing Ghostscript, you don't have to do anything here. If you're installing Ghostscript for the first time on a new arch filesystem, though, read on.

Go to http://www.sourceforge.net/ and find a project named gs-fonts. From its downloads, pull down two files.

• ghostscript-fonts-std-6.0.tar.gz
• ghostscript-fonts-other-6.0.tar.gz

Untar each of them right into /cis/share/ghostscript. In the text below, replace FOO with whatever directory you've downloaded them into. Once you've unpacked them, you're done; you can delete the .tar.gz files if you want.

   gzip -dc ghostscript-fonts-std-6.0.tar.gz |( cd /cis/share/ghostscript ; tar xf - )
   gzip -dc ghostscript-fonts-other-6.0.tar.gz |( cd /cis/share/ghostscript ; tar xf - )

Documentation

   ln -s /cis/share/ghostscript/8.00/doc /cis/share/doc/ghostscript