Hi all. As you may know, the GNU Project is involved in the so called "PDF effort". The GNU Project has identified many problems with the actual PDF situation. The most critical one is that many governments are forcing citizens to use PDF features not supported by a free reader (and writer, in the case of PDF interactive forms).
Since the PDF spec (both Adobe's and the newly created ISO PDF/A) is open, we cannot ask the governments to not use the PDF format, but we should write a free implementation. We concluded that the GNU Project should ship an integrated product for read and write PDF files that would be able to work on all plattforms where Acrobat Reader actually run (GNU/Linux, MS Windows, PocketPC, PalmOS, ebook readers, ...). So i got the GNU ghostscript maintainership, and we will use GNU ghostscript and GNU gv for construct that integrated product. The advantage of ghostscript in respect with other PDF implementations (the library used by xpdf, for example) is that ghostscript fully implements the Adobe Imaging Model via the postscript interpreter. The idea is to achieve a similar success than the Mozilla project, but in the PDF market. In that way, citizens will be able to retain their freedom when interacting with his governments. There is much work to do on both gs and gv. Roughly, the main tasks are: - Apply most of the ESP Ghostscript patches into GNU Ghostscript. - Implement the full Adobe PDF 1.6 specification on GNU Ghostscript. - Implement the full ISO 19005 PDF/A specification on GNU Ghostscript. - Rewrite gv to use a cross-plattform graphical toolkit (gtk+2?). - Change the way gv communicate with gs (from using pipes to using library calls). - Implement interactive capabilities on gv (form filling, eps placement, etc). Note that the relationship between GNU ghostscript and Aladding ghostscript is going to change: we cannot wait for Aladdin freeing its improvements from ASPL Ghostscript. So, instead of pasively get the ASPL Ghostscript improvements, we are going into active development in GNU Ghostscript. In the following days i am going to insert tasks into the ghostscript and gv savannah projects, and tag some branches on the CVS repositories. -- José E. Marchesi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GNU No es Unix! http://www.gnu.org GNU España http://es.gnu.org _______________________________________________ bug-ghostscript mailing list bug-ghostscript@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-ghostscript
