## Ghostscript – Black Box Magic

### What is Ghostscript?

For those not familiar, Ghostscript (gs), strictly defined, is a so-called “PostScript interpreter”, and many programs use `gs` for PostScript conversions and import/export. Ghostscript has become one of the core building blocks of OSS software. It would be hard to imagine modern OSS distributions and software without it.

Likewise, Scribus uses Ghostscript, sometimes taking advantage of the most sophisticated features that are available only in the latest versions. Scribus uses `gs` for two purposes, the first one being the import of rasterized EPS files into image frames. The second feature that requires `gs` is the Print Preview.

We always encourage you to have the latest Ghostscript available for your system.

### Installing Ghostscript

#### Linux/UNIX

As mentioned above, Ghostscript is required by many applications. Thus, it’s unlikely that it isn’t installed on your system. If, for any reason, `gs` isn’t available on your system or your system is being shipped with a version that’s too old (you should at least use Ghostscript 8.6 with Scribus), you can download a tarball from the `gs` website. Be careful to download Ghostscript itself, not ghostpdl, whose source code is in the same directory. Then follow the build instructions in the tarball and install it.

#### Windows

See the general information about Scribus on Windows for further details.

#### Mac OS X

There are different ways to install Ghostscript for Mac OS X, but unfortunately, none of them seems to be as easy as most Mac users are used to:

- You can download a ZIP archive with four DMGs of `gs` for various OS X versions. Please read the related info file to decide which version you need.
- You can install `gs` via Fink.
- The most current releases of Ghostscript are always available via MacPorts.
- Finally, you can, of course, download the latest source code and compile Ghostscript yourself.

#### OS/2 and eComStation

See the general information about Scribus on OS/2 for further details.