|Approximately 238 bugs have been fixed since version 8.62. Of particular note
|are robustness and performance improvements with large files, invalid PDF, and
|font handling.
|
|The major new feature of this release is multithreaded rendering. This can be
|requested by passing -dNumRenderingThreads=n on the command line. The input
|document is first parsed, and then each page is split into n bands which are
|rendered concurrently. This can provide a significant reduction in processing
|time on multi-core systems.
|
|Images are now always interpolated in their source colorspace. This improves
|correctness for XPS documents and avoids bypassing the custom color management
|callbacks for interpolated images. Interpolation and color management are both
|expensive operations, so this affects performance with large images. The effect
|can be positive or negative depending on the file and the target resolution. If
|performance is a problem, we suggest running with -dNOINTERPOLATION.
|
|Support for OpenPrinting Vector devices has been upgraded to version 1.0.
|
|There are two new devices in this release, both experimental. Behdad Esfahbod
|has contributed a cairo output device which uses the cairo graphics library to
|generate PDF, SVG, EPS, or PNG files, based on the requested filename
|extension. The svgwrite device directly outputs Scalable Vector Graphics, the
|W3C XML vector graphics format. Both support only vector art at this point;
|text and images will not be represented efficiently.
|
|Incompatible changes
|
|The maximum number of color components has been reduced to 8 (from 252) as a
|performance improvement. Eight is the largest number commonly used and the
|largest number for which we support continuous tone images. Users with special
|needs can restore the previous behavior by setting the
|GS_CLIENT_COLOR_MAX_COMPONENTS preprocessor symbol to the required number of
|components at compile time.
|
|The -Z: debugging option now uses 'realtime' instead of 'usertime' when
|reporting timing information on unix-like systems. This has always been the
|case on windows-like systems.
|
|Obsolete makefiles for the DesqView environment have been removed.
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