[Scribus] ghostscript-esp vs. ghostscript-afpl vs. ghostscript-gnu

[Craig Bradney]

On Tuesday 07 June 2005 20:01, Sebastian Roeder wrote:
> Today I come up with some ghostscript questions and hope someone can
> shet a light on this - it's about different ghostscript versions.
>
> For normal office used I did never care about ghostscript - the distros
> normaly use a ghostscript-esp (at that time version 7.x) that is under
> GPL and works togehter with non-postscript printers and CUPS. The ESP
> suffix seems to be for Epson who started to make ghostscript-afpl
> non-postscript printer complient. (Note: There is currently 8.15.rc3 on
> the Cups HP).
>
> When I worked with Scribus I was often recommended to use
> ghostscript-afpl instead, which is always more up to date (e.g. 8.15)
> and can be used for free (as in free beer) under the Aladin License.
> However this seems not to be the latest (stable) development. The latest
> version (e.g. 8.51) seems to be non-free, one has to pay a licence fee
> for it.
>
> To make confusion even worse there is ghostcript-gnu:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/ghostscript/
>
> The ghostscript main page points out that this was the name of
> ghostscript-gpl until 2004, but they have a new 8.16 release now.
>
> OK, I am using ghostcript-afpl-8.15 atm on Gentoo with regard to best
> Scribus results - this means I have to print my everyday docs on WinXP
> because of the "CUPS-non-postscript-incompatiblety".
>
> My questions are which ghostscript-* version is best for Scribus (and
> what the hell is the difference between the gnu one and the others) and
> maybe what I can do to get my printer to work + best Scribus results. As
> a sidenote, the printer is PCL aware (Brother HL5140 laserprinter).
>
> And please correct me if I gave a wrong summary ;-)

After a lot of discussions over the previous year that we were involved in 
(not solely responsible for though) there was a move to start to push the 
advances from GS AFPL into an updated GNU version. The distros had hacked and 
hacked to add in drivers to the 7.07 series but due to various changes these 
drivers were not compatible with the latest 8.xx GS. Various people have 
worked on bringing a compatible version of updated code and drivers to bring 
together the newer versions. Peter will correct me if I'm wrong on this 
stuff.

I have only just seen ghostscript-gnu today and I would suggest you give it a 
try and see if it includes the capability you need. I do read however in my 
submitted bugs in Gentoo's tracker that AFPL 8.51+ will be coming to Gentoo 
pretty soon.

Craig
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