Blog

The Evolution of GhostPDL

By Robin Watts - Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Artifex has a long history of producing best-in-class software for handling different page description languages. First Postscript, then PDF, PCL, PXL, and XPS. The Ghostscript family has been trusted and used daily by millions of users across the globe for decades.

Deploying any one of these languages within a printer has traditionally been a relatively simple task. Deploying more than one within the same device has been more complicated, with the integrator needing to write code to detect the type of the incoming data and to send it to the appropriate interpreter.

Historically, we’ve used GhostPDL as a catch-all term to encompass our entire line of products. Last year, we brought all these disparate products together into a single package, called, appropriately enough, GhostPDL.

When running on a printer (or server) GhostPDL now automatically detects the type of data being fed to it and processes it accordingly. The individual interpreters all plug into a top-level module that handles both automatic language detection and Printer Job Language (PJL) based configuration.

The exact set of interpreters present in an installation can be tuned by the integrator for their specific product/use cases.

Built on our existing technology, GhostPDL can seamlessly access the same wide range of output devices included with the Ghostscript family. Whether your workflow involves writing to a bitmap format, transcoding to another PDL, or even calling a custom device to drive your own hardware, GhostPDL can handle it all instantly. Additionally, the GhostPDL API is almost identical to that of Ghostscript, providing a painless upgrade path for existing users.

In addition to our existing PDL modules (PS, PDF, PCL, PXL, and XPS) we have now added new modules to handle a range of common image formats. With these installed GhostPDL will handle JPEGs (both JFIF and EXIF), PWGs, TIFFs, PNGs, JBIG2s, and JPEG2000s.

Customers can extend the system with support for additional formats, either by writing their own modules or by working with Artifex to develop the same. For commercial customers interested in trying it, we also have pre-release support for URF files as used with Apple’s AirPrint.

GhostPDL can also be used in conjunction with ScanSkew, our high-performance skew detection and correction library to automatically deskew scanned data before processing.