tower@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU (Leonard H. Tower Jr.) (02/27/89)
Forwarded-For: Peter Deutsch This software will soon be available for anonymous uucp on osu-cis. Send bug reports to bug-ghostscript@prep.ai.mit.edu or newsgroup gnu.ghostscript.bug (but not both; they are the same thing). ghostscript-1.2.tar.Z is now on prep.ai.mit.edu:/gp/gnu and ready for release. High points: - Has run successfully on various PC machines, also on Sun-3 and Sun-4 under X11R3. (It should still run on VAXen under Ultrix, but I haven't been able to test it.) - Upgrades the interpreter to compatibility with the current (version 25.0) level of PostScript (specifically, recognizing //name, and the new operators for packed arrays and font cache parameters). - Fixes a large number of minor bugs. - Speeds up the interpreter considerably. Old users should read carefully the section of history.doc that describes the changes in releases 1.1 (never distributed) and 1.2. All users should probably (re)read make.doc. Some of the file names have changed, and the 'make' procedure has changed slightly. I apologize for the very long delay in getting this out. Now that I have a reliable Internet connection, future releases should come out with much less delay. After March 1, my mailbox for Ghostscript-related matters will be ...sun!parcplace!aladdin!ghost; until then, I'll be reading bug-ghostscript. I hope to do a 1.3 release in about 2 months, and then to wait a long time (maybe 4-6 months) before doing another one. Current plans for the 1.3 release are: - Add a reasonable font mechanism, specifically, the ability to read and cache BDF fonts. This will be done in such a way that it will be easy to add other font formats in the future. (I've already written and tested the BDF format parser.) - Add garbage collection and compaction to the memory manager. (Most of the hooks are there already.) I'd be thrilled if someone wanted to bring the performance of the X back end up to a reasonable level. This is likely to require changing the interface between the main code and the back end: I welcome suggestions for how to do this. (I haven't yet read the DDX spec, which I expect will give me some good ideas.)