Details of Ghostscript output devices

Table of contents


Documentation for some older, superceded devices has been moved to another document. In general such devices are deprecated and will be removed in future versions of Ghostscript. In general all older printer drivers can be replaced by the ijs interface and one of the available 3rd party raster driver collections. We recommend moving to the ijs device for all such printing.

Notes on measurements


Centimeters and millimeters
ISO standard paper sizes such as A4 and A3 are commonly represented in the SI units of centimeters and millimeters. Centimeters are abbreviated cm, millimeters mm. ISO A4 paper is quite close to 210×297 millimeters (approximately 8.3×11.7 inches).
1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters. The inch measure is sometimes represented by in or a quotation mark (") to the right of a measure, like 8.5in or 8.5". U.S. "letter" paper is exactly 8.5in×11in, approximately 21.6cm×27.9cm. (See in the usage documentation all the paper sizes predefined in Ghostscript.)
Dots per inch
Dots per inch or dpi is the common measure of printing resolution in the US.
Bits per pixel
Commonly abbreviated bpp this is the number of digital bits used to represent the color of each pixel. This is also referred to as 'bit depth' or 'pixel depth'.

Image file formats

Ghostscript supports output to a variety of image file formats and is widely used for rasterizing postscript and pdf files. A collection of such formats ('output devices' in Ghostscript terminology) are described in this section.

Here are some commonly useful driver options that apply to all raster drivers. Options specific to particular file formats are described in their respective sections below.


This is a general option telling Ghostscript what to name the output. It can either be a single filename 'tiger.png' or a template 'figure-%03d.jpg' where the %03d is replaced by the page number.


This option sets the resolution of the output file in dots per inch. The default value if you don't specify this options is usually 72 dpi.


These options control the use of subsample antialiasing. Their use is highly recommended for producing high quality rasterizations of the input files. The size of the subsampling box n should be 4 for optimum output, but smaller values can be used for faster rendering. Antialiasing is enabled separately for text and graphics content.

It is also conventional to call Ghostscript with the '-dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE' trio of options when rasterizing to a file. These suppress interactive prompts and enable some security checks on the file to be run. Please see the Use documentation for a complete description.

PNG file format

PNG (pronounced 'ping') stands for Portable Network Graphics, and is the recommended format for high-quality images. It supports full quality color and transparency, offers excellent lossless compression of the image data, and is widely supported. Please see the PNG website for a complete description of the format.

Ghostscript provides a variety of devices for PNG output varying by bit depth. For normal use we recommend png16m for 24-bit RGB color, or pnggray for grayscale. The png256, png16 and pngmono devices respectively provide 8-bit color, 4-bit color and black-and-white for special needs. The pngmonod device is also a black-and-white device, but the output is formed from an internal 8 bit grayscale rendering which is then error diffused and converted down to 1bpp.

The pngalpha device is 32-bit RGBA color with transparency indicating pixel coverage. The background is transparent unless it has been explicitly filled. PDF 1.4 transparent files do not give a transparent background with this device. Text and graphics anti-aliasing are enabled by default.


The pngmonod, png16m and pnggray devices all respond to the following:

This causes the internal rendering to be scaled down by the given (small integer) factor before being output. For example, the following will produce a 200dpi output png from a 300dpi internal rendering:
 gs -sDEVICE=png16m -r600 -dDownScaleFactor=3 -o tiger.png\

The pngmonod device responds to the following option:

-dMinFeatureSize=state (0 to 4; default = 1)
This option allows a minimum feature size to be set; if any output pixel appears on its own, or as part of a group of pixels smaller than MinFeatureSize x MinFeatureSize, it will be expanded to ensure that it does. This is useful for output devices that are high resolution, but that have trouble rendering isolated pixels.
While this parameter will accept values from 0 to 4, not all are fully implemented. 0 and 1 cause no change to the output (as expected). 2 works as specified. Values of 3 and 4 are accepted for compatibility, but behave as for 2.

The pngalpha device responds to the following option:

-dBackgroundColor=16#RRGGBB (RGB color, default white = 16#ffffff)
For the pngalpha device only, set the suggested background color in the PNG bKGD chunk. When a program reading a PNG file does not support alpha transparency, the PNG library converts the image using either a background color if supplied by the program or the bKGD chunk. One common web browser has this problem, so when using <body bgcolor="CCCC00"> on a web page you would need to use -dBackgroundColor=16#CCCC00 when creating alpha transparent PNG images for use on the page.


Examples of how to use Ghostscript to convert postscript to PNG image files:

      -sOutputFile=tiger.png examples/tiger.png
 gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -r150 -sDEVICE=pnggray -dTextAlphaBits=4 \
      -sOutputFile=doc-%02d.png doc.pdf

JPEG file format (JFIF)

Ghostscript includes output drivers that can produce jpeg files from postscript or pdf images. These are the jpeg and jpeggray devices.

Technically these produce Independent JPEG Group JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format) files, the common sort found on the web.

Please note that JPEG is a compression method specifically intended for continuous-tone images such as photographs, not for graphics, and it is therefore quite unsuitable for the vast majority of page images produced with PostScript. For anything other than pages containing simple images the lossy compression of the jpeg format will result in poor quality output regardless of the input. To learn more about the distinction, consult a reference about uses and abuses of JPEG, such as the JPEG FAQ



gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -sOutputFile=foo.jpg



-dQFactor=M (float from 0.0 to 1.0)

At this writing the default JPEG quality level of 75 is equivalent to -dQFactor=0.5, but the JPEG default might change in the future. There is currently no support for any additional JPEG compression options, such as the other DCTEncode filter parameters.


The PNM (portable network map) family of formats are very simple uncompressed image formats commonly used on unix-like systems. They are particularly useful for testing or as input to an external conversion utility.

A wide variety of data formats and depths is supported. Devices include pbm pbmraw pgm pgmraw pgnm pgnmraw pnm pnmraw ppm ppmraw pkm pkmraw pksm pksmraw.

TIFF file formats

TIFF is a loose collection of formats, now largely superceded by PNG except in applications where backward compatibility or special compression is required. The TIFF file format is described in the TIFF 6.0 Specification published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.

There are two unrelated sets of TIFF drivers. There are five color TIFF drivers that produce uncompressed output:

Produces 8-bit gray output.
Produces 48-bit RGB output (16 bits per component).
Produces 64-bit CMYK output (16 bits per component).
The tiffsep device creates multiple output files: a single 32 bit composite CMYK file and multiple tiffgray files, one for each separation. The default compression is lzw but this may be overridden by the -sCompression= option.

The file specified via the OutputFile command line parameter will contain CMYK data. This data is based upon the CMYK data within the file plus an equivalent CMYK color for each spot color. The equivalent CMYK color for each spot color is determined using the alternate tint transform function specified in the Separation and DeviceN color spaces. Since this file is created based upon having color planes for each colorant, the file will correctly represent the appearance of overprinting with spot colors.

File names for the separations for the CMYK colorants are created by appending '.Cyan.tif', '.Magenta.tif' '.Yellow.tif' or '.Black.tif' to the end of the file name specified via the OutputFile parameter. File names for the spot color separation files are created by appending the Spot color name in '(' and ').tif' to the filename.

If desired the file names for the spot color separation files can be created by appending '.sn.tif' (where n is the spot color number, see below) to the end of the file name specified via the OutputFile parameter. This change is a compile time edit. To obtain this type of output the function create_separation_file_name in gdevtsep.c should be called with a true value for its use_sep_name parameter.

The tiffsep device will automatically recognize spot colors. In this case their order is determined by when they are found in the input file. The names of spot colors may be specified via the SeparationColorNames device parameters.

Internally each spot color is assigned a spot color number. These numbers start with 0 for the first spot color. The spot color numbers are assigned in the same order as the names are printed to stderr (see below). This order also matches the ordering in the SeparationColorNames list, if this parameter is specified. The spot color numbers are not affected by the SeparationOrder parameter.

If only a subset of the colorants for a file is desired, then the separations to be output can be selected via the SeparationOrder device parameter. When colorants are selected via the SeparationOrder parameter, the composite CMYK output contains the equivalent CMYK data only for the selected colorants.

NOTE: the composite CMYK output, because it uses the tint transformed colour equivalents for any spot colours (see Postscript Language Reference "Separation Color Spaces" and "DeviceN Color Spaces"), may not produce an accurate preview, if the job uses overprinting.

The tiffsep device also prints the names of any spot colors detected within a document to stderr. (stderr is also used for the output from the bbox device.) For each spot color, the name of the color is printed preceded by '%%SeparationName: '. This provides a simple mechanism for users and external applications to be informed about the names of spot colors within a document.

Generally Ghostscript will support a maximum of 64 process and spot colors. The tiffsep device and the psdcmyk device maintain rendered data in a planar form with a maximum of 64 planes set by the definition of GS_CLIENT_COLOR_MAX_COMPONENTS in the code. That is there can be up to 64 colorants accurately handled with overprint on a single page. If more than 64 colorants are encountered, those beyond 64 will be mapped to CMYK using the alternate tint transform.

When rendering a PDF document, Ghostscript can deteremine prior to rendering how many colorants occur on a particular page. With Postscript, this is not possible in general. To optimize for this, when rendering Postscript, it is possible to specify at run-time the number of spot colorants you wish to have the device capable of handling using the -dMaxSpots=N command option, where N is the number of spot colorants that you wish to be able to handle and must be less than 60 (60 + 4 CMYK process colorants gets us to a maximum of 64 colorants on a page). If you specify more than is needed, the document will render more slowly. The ideal case is to use the same number as the maximum number of spot colorants that occur on a single page of the document. If more spot colorants are encountered than is specified by -dMaxSpots, then a warning will be printed indicating that some spot colorants will be mapped to CMYK using the alternate tint transform.

The tiffsep device accepts a -dBitsPerComponent= option, which may be set to 8 (the default) or 1. In 1bpp mode, the device renders each component internally in 8 bits, but then converts down to 1bpp with error diffusion before output as described below in the tiffscaled device. No composite file is produced in 1bpp mode, only individual separations.

The device also accepts the -dDownScaleFactor= and -dMinFeatureSize= parameters as described below in the tiffscaled device, but MinFeatureSize is only honoured in 1bpp mode.

When -dDownScaleFactor= is used in 8 bit mode with the tiffsep (and psdcmyk/psrgb) device(s) 2 additional "special" ratios are available, 32 and 34. 32 provides a 3:2 downscale (so from 300 to 200 dpi, say). 34 produces a 3:4 upscale (so from 300 to 400 dpi, say).

The tiffsep1 device creates multiple output files, one for each component or separation color. The device creates multiple tiffg4 files (the compression can be set using -sCompression= described below). The 1 bit per component output is halftoned using the current screening set by 'setcolorscreen' or 'sethalftone' which allows for ordered dither or stochastic threshold array dither to be used. This is faster than error diffusion.

The file specified via the OutputFile command line parameter will not be created (it is opened, but deleted prior to finishing each page).

File names for the separations for the CMYK colorants are created by appending '(Cyan).tif', '(Magenta).tif' '(Yellow).tif' or '(Black).tif' to the to the end of the file name specified via the OutputFile parameter. File names for the spot color separation files are created by appending the Spot color name in '(' and ').tif' to the filename. If the file name specified via the OutputFile parameter ends with the suffix '.tif', then the suffix is removed prior to adding the component name in '(' and ').tif'.

The tiffscaled device renders internally at the specified resolution to an 8 bit greyscale image. This is then scaled down by an integer scale factor (set by -dDownScaleFactor= described below) and then error diffused to give 1bpp output. The compression can be set using -sCompression= as described below.
The tiffscaled8 device renders internally at the specified resolution to an 8 bit greyscale image. This is then scaled down by an integer scale factor (set by -dDownScaleFactor= described below) and then error diffused to give 8bpp output (error diffusion at this stage is probably pointless and may be removed in future versions). The compression can be set using -sCompression= as described below.
The tiffscaled24 device renders internally at the specified resolution to a 24 bit rgb image. This is then scaled down by an integer scale factor (set by -dDownScaleFactor= described below) and then error diffused to give 24bpp output (error diffusion at this stage is probably pointless and may be removed in future versons). The compression can be set using -sCompression= as described below.

The remaining TIFF drivers all produce black-and-white output with different compression modes:

G3 fax encoding with no EOLs
G3 fax encoding with EOLs
2-D G3 fax encoding
G4 fax encoding
LZW-compatible (tag = 5) compression
PackBits (tag = 32773) compression

See the AdjustWidth option documentation below for important information about these devices.


All TIFF drivers support creation of files that are comprised of more than a single strip. Multi-strip files reduce the memory requirement on the reader, since readers need only store and process one strip at a time. The MaxStripSize parameter controls the strip size:

-dMaxStripSize=N (non-negative integer; default = 8192)
Set the maximum (uncompressed) size of a strip.

The TIFF 6.0 specification, Section 7, page 27, recommends that the size of each strip be about 8 Kbytes.

If the value of the MaxStripSize parameter is smaller than a single image row, then no error will be generated, and the TIFF file will be generated correctly using one row per strip. Note that smaller strip sizes increase the size of the file by increasing the size of the StripOffsets and StripByteCounts tables, and by reducing the effectiveness of the compression which must start over for each strip.

If the value of MaxStripSize is 0, then the entire image will be a single strip.

Since v. 8.51 the logical order of bits within a byte, FillOrder, tag = 266 is controlled by a parameter:

-dFillOrder=1 | 2 (default = 1)
If this option set to 2 then pixels are arranged within a byte such that pixels with lower column values are stored in the lower-order bits of the byte; otherwise pixels are arranged in reverse order.
Earlier versions of Ghostscript always generated TIFF files with FillOrder = 2. According to the TIFF 6.0 specification, Section 8, page 32, support of FillOrder = 2 is not required in a Baseline TIFF compliant reader

The compression scheme that is used for the image data can be set for all tiff devices with:

-sCompression=none | crle | g3 | g4 | lzw | pack
Change the compression scheme of the tiff device. crle, g3, and g4 may only be used with 1 bit devices (including tiffsep1).

For the tiffsep device, it changes the compression scheme of the separation files and composite cmyk file (which is lzw by default). It defaults to g4 for the tiffsep1 device.

The black-and-white TIFF devices also provide the following parameters:

-dAdjustWidth=state (0, 1, or value; default = 1)
If this option is 1 then if the requested page width is in the range of either 1680..1736 or 2000..2056 columns, set the page width to A4 (1728 columns) or B4 (2048 columns) respectively. If this option is set to a value >1 then the width is unconditionally adjusted to this value. This behavior is the default for all the fax based devices (i.e. all the black and white devices except tifflzw, tiffpack and tiffscaled). Pass -dAdjustWidth=0 to force this behaviour off.
When using this option with tiffscaled it is the downsampled size that triggers the adjustment.
While this parameter will accept values from 0 to 4, not all are fully implemented. 0 and 1 cause no change to the output (as expected). 2 works as specified. 3 and 4 currently expand pixels correctly horizontally, but only expand vertically to the 2 pixel size.
The mechanism by which MinFeatureSize is implemented for tiffscaled is different, in that it is done as part of the error diffusion. Values of 0 to 2 work as expected, but values 3 and 4 (while accepted for compatibility) will behave as for 2.

The tiffscaled, tiffscaled8 and tiffscaled24 TIFF drivers also provide this parameter:

-dDownScaleFactor=factor (small non-negative integer; default = 1)
If this option set then the page is downscaled by the given factor on both axes before error diffusion takes place. For example rendering with -r600 and then specifying -dDownScaleFactor=3 will produce a 200dpi image.


Ghostscript supports a variety of fax encodings, both encapsulated in TIFF (see above) and as raw files. The later case is described here.

The fax devices are faxg3, faxg32d and faxg4.

The fax devices support the MinFeatureSize parameter as defined in the TIFF device section.


BMP is a simple uncompressed image format commonly used on MS Windows. It is supported by the devices bmpmono bmpgray bmpsep1 bmpsep8 bmp16 bmp256 bmp16m bmp32b.


PCX is an image format sometimes used on MS Windows. It has some support for image compression and alternate color spaces, and so can be a useful way to output CMYK. It is supported by the pcxmono pcxgray pcx16 pcx256 pcx24b pcxcmyk series of devices.


PSD is the image format used by Adobe Photoshop. It is supported by the psdcmyk and psdrgb devices. Of special interest with the psdcmyk device is that it supports spot colors. See the comments under the tiffsep and tiffsep1 device about the maximum number of spot colors supported by Ghostscript

These devices support the same -dDownScaleFactor= ratios as tiffsep.

High-level devices

In addition to raster image files, Ghostscript supports output in a number of 'high-level' formats. These allow Ghostscript to preserve (as much as possible) the drawing elements of the input file maintaining flexibility, resolution independence, and editability.

PDF writer

The pdfwrite device outputs PDF. Please refer to Ps2pdf.htm for the extensive pdfwrite device options.

PS2 writer

The ps2write device outputs postscript language levels 2 and 3. Please refer to Ps2ps2.htm for the ps2write device options. It is recommnded that this device is used for PostScript output, unless level 1 PostScript is required in which case you must use the pswrite device below.

PS writer

The pswrite device outputs postscript. This device is now deprecated and should only be used when level 1 PostScript output is required.


-dLanguageLevel=1 | 1.5 | 2 | 3 (default is 2)
Set the language level of the generated file. Language level 1.5 is language level 1 with color extensions. Currently language level 3 generates the same PostScript as 2.

EPS writer

The epswrite device outputs encapsulated postscript.






-dCompressMode=1 | 3 (default is 1)
Set the compression algorithm used for bitmap graphics. RLE=1, DeltaRow=3. (JPEG=2 is unimplemented)

Text output




Display Devices

Ghostscript is often used for screen display of postscript and pdf documents. In many cases, a client or 'viewer' application calls the Ghostscript engine to do the rasterization and handles the display of the resulting image itself, but it is also possible to invoke Ghostscript directly and select an output device which directly handles displaying the image on screen.

This section describes the various display-oriented devices that are available in Ghostscript.

X Window System

Perhaps the most common use of of a display device is with the X Window System on unix-like systems. It is the default device on the command line client on such systems, and is used more creatively by the gv client application.

The available devices are:

This is the default device, handling display on X11R6.
This is the x11 device, but with antialiasing. It is equivalent to invoking the x11 device with the options -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dMaxBitmap=50000000.
This device rasterizes the image in the CMYK color space, then flattens it to RGB for display. It's intended for testing only.
This is a strict black-and-white device for 1-bit monochrome displays.
This is a device for 2 bpp (4-level) monochrome displays.
This is a device for 4 bpp (16-level) monochrome displays.

On Mac OS X as of 10.6, the X server (XQuartz) only supports color depth 15 and 24. Depth 15 isn't well-tested, and it may be desirable, for serious use, to switch to depth 24 with:

defaults write org.x.X11 depth 24


The display device is used by the MS Windows, OS/2 and the gtk+ versions of ghostscript.


The display device has several user settable options.

-dDisplayFormat=N (integer bit-field)
Some common values are 16#30804 for Windows RGB, 16#804 for gtk+ RGB, 16#20101 for Windows monochrome, 16#102 for gtk+ monochrome, 16#20802 grayscale, 16#20808 for CMYK, 16#a0800 for separations. The bit fields are
  • native (1), gray (2), RGB (4), CMYK (8), or separation (80000) color spaces.
  • unused first byte (40) or last byte (80).
  • 1 (100), 4 (400), or 8 (800) bits/component.
  • bigendian (00000 = RGB) or littleendian (10000 = BGR) order.
  • top first (20000) or bottom first (00000) raster.
  • 16 bits/pixel with 555 (00000) or 565 (40000) bitfields.
For more details, see the Ghostscript Interpreter API.
Set the initial resolution resolution for the display device. This is used by the Windows clients to set the display device resolution to the Windows display logical resolution. This can be overriden by the command line option -rDPI.
When using the separation color space, the following options may be set using setpagedevice, as described in the PostScript Language Reference:
An array giving the names of the spot colors
An array giving the names and order of the colorants to be output.

IJS - Inkjet and other raster devices

IJS is a relatively new initiative to improve the quality and ease of use of inkjet printing with Ghostscript. Using IJS, you can add new drivers, or upgrade existing ones, without recompiling Ghostscript. All driver authors are encouraged to adapt their drivers for IJS, and if there is an IJS driver available for your printer, it should be your first choice.

Please see the IJS web page for more information about IJS, including a listing of IJS-compatible drivers.

A typical command line for IJS is:

gs -dSAFER -sDEVICE=ijs -sIjsServer=hpijs -sDeviceManufacturer=HEWLETT-PACKARD -sDeviceModel='DESKJET 990' -dIjsUseOutputFD -sOutputFile=/dev/usb/lp1 -dNOPAUSE -- examples/tiger.eps

Individual IJS command line parameters are as follows:

Sets the pathname for the IJS server (ie printer driver). Ghostscript will spawn a new process for this driver, and communicate with it using the IJS protocol. The pathname need not be absolute, as the PATH environment variable is searched, but it's probably a good idea for robustness and security. Note also that if -dSAFER is not specified, it's possible for PostScript code to set this parameter, so it can cause arbitrary code to be executed. See the section on Security for more information.
These parameters select the device according to IEEE-1284 standard device ID strings. In general, consult the documentation for the driver to find the appropriate settings. Note that, if the value contains a space, you'll want to quote the value in your shell, as in the example above.
This parameter allows you to set arbitrary IJS parameters on the IJS driver. The format is a comma-separated list of key=value pairs. If it is necessary to send a value containing a comma or backslash, it can be escaped with a backslash. Thus, '-sIjsParams=Foo=bar,Baz=a\,b' sets the parameter Foo to "bar", and Baz to "a,b".
This flag indicates that Ghostscript should open the output file and pass a file descriptor to the server. If not set, Ghostscript simply passes the filename set in OutputFile to the server. In most cases, this flag won't matter, but if you have a driver which works only with OutputFD (such as hpijs 1.0.2), or if you're using the -sOutputFile="|cmd" syntax, you'll need to set it.
This parameter controls the number of bits per sample. The default value of 8 should be appropriate for most work. For monochrome images, use -dBitsPerSample=1.

Generic Ghostscript options that are particularly relevant for IJS are summarized below:

Sets the resolution, in dpi. If the resolution is not specified, Ghostscript queries the IJS server to determine the preferred resolution. When the resolution is specified, it overrides the value (if any) preferred by the IJS server.
These flags enable duplex (two-sided) printing. Tumble controls the orientation. When Tumble is false, the pages are oriented suitably at the left or right. When Tumble is true, the pages are oriented suitably for binding at the top or bottom.
Use this flag to select the process color model. Suitable values include DeviceGray, DeviceRGB, and DeviceCMYK.

Building IJS

IJS is included by default on Unix gcc builds, and also in autoconf'ed builds. Others may need some makefile tweaking. First, make sure the IJS device is selected:


Next, make sure that the path and execution type are set in the top level makefile. The values for Unix are as follows:


At present, "unix" and "win" are the only supported values for IJSEXECTYPE. If neither sounds appropriate for your system, it's possible that more porting work is needed.

Last, make sure that ijs.mak is included in the top level makefile. It should be present right after the include of icclib.mak.

IJS is not inherently platform-specific. We're very much interested in taking patches from people who have ported it to non-mainstream platforms. And once it's built, you won't have to recompile Ghostscript to support new drivers!

Rinkj - Resplendent inkjet driver

The Rinkj driver is an experimental new driver, capable of driving some Epson printers at a very high level of quality. It is not currently recommended for the faint of heart.

You will need to add the following line to your makefile:


Most of the configuration parameters, including resolution, choice of printer model, and linearization curves, are in a separate setup file. In addition, we rely heavily on an ICC profile for mapping document colors to actual device colors.

A typical command line invocation is:

gs -r1440x720 -sDEVICE=rinkj -sOutputFile=/dev/usb/lp0 -sSetupFile=lib/rinkj-2200-setup -sProfileOut=2200-cmyk.icm -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH

Individual Rinkj command line parameters are as follows:

Specifies the path for the setup file.
Specifies the path for the output ICC profile. This profile should be a link profile, mapping the ProcessColorModel (DeviceCMYK by default) to the device color space.

For 6- and 7-color devices, the target color space for the output profile is currently a 4-component space. The conversion from this into the 6- or 7-color space (the "ink split") is done by lookup tables in the setup file.

Setup files are in a simple "Key: value" text format. Relevant keys are:

The manufacturer and model of the individual device, using the same syntax as IEEE printer identification strings. Currently, the only supported manufacturer string is "EPSON", and the only supported model strings are "Stylus Photo 2200" and "Stylus Photo 7600".
The resolution in dpi. Usually, this should match the Ghostscript resolution set with the -r switch. Otherwise, the page image will be scaled.
Selects among variant dither options. Currently, the choices are 1 for one-bit dither, and 2, for a 2-bit variable dot dither.
Controls the aspect ratio for highlight dot placement. Valid values are 1, 2, and 4. For best results, choose a value near the x resolution divided by the y resolution. For example, if resolution is 1440x720, aspect should be 2.
Chooses a microdot size. On EPSON devices, this value is passed directly through to the "ESC ( e" command. See EPSON documentation for further details (see, I told you this wasn't for the faint of heart).
Enables (1) or disables (0) unidirectional printing, which is slower but possibly higher quality.
Adds a linearization look-up table. The plane is one of "CcMmYKk". The lookup table data follows. The line immediately following AddLut is the number of data points. Then, for each data point is a line consisting of two space-separated floats - the output value and the input value. If more than one LUT is specified for a single plane, they are applied in sequence.

A typical setup file is supplied in lib/rinkj-2200-setup. It is configured for the 2200, but can be adapted to the 7600 just by changing the "Model" line.

In addition, sample profiles are available at

A known issue with this driver is poor support for margins and page size. In some cases, this will cause an additional page to be ejected at the end of a job. You may be able to work around this by supplying a cut-down value for -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS, for example 755 for an 8.5x11 inch page on the EPSON 2200.

HP Deskjet official drivers

HP provides official drivers for many of their Deskjet printer models. In order to use these drivers, you will need the HP Inkjet Server as well as Ghostscript, available from This version of Ghostscript includes the patch from version 0.97 of the hpijs software. If you are installing hpijs from an RPM, you will only need the hpijs RPM, not the Ghostscript-hpijs one, as the code needed to work with hpijs is already included.

Note that newer version of the hpijs drivers support the IJS protocol. If you can, you should consider using the ijs driver instead. Among other things, the hpijs Ghostscript driver is Unix-only, and is untested on older Unix platforms.

As of the 0.97 version, hpijs supports the following printer models:

DeskJet 350C Series:
DeskJet 600C Series:
600C, 660C, 670/672C, 670TV, 680/682C
DeskJet 600C Series Photo:
610/612C, 640/648C, 690/692/693/694/695/697C
DeskJet 630C Series:
DeskJet 800C Series:
810/812C, 830/832C, 840/842/843C, 880/882C, 895C
DeskJet 900C Series, PhotoSmart::
930/932C, 950/952C, 970C, PhotoSmart 1000/1100
DeskJet 990C, PhotoSmart:
960C, 980C, 990C, PhotoSmart 1215/1218

You will need to add the following line to your makefile:

DEVICE_DEVS2=$(DD) $(DD) $(DD) $(DD) $(DD) $(DD) $(DD)

Please see for more information about this driver. Thanks to the folks at HP, especially David Suffield for making this driver available and working to integrate it with Ghostscript.

Gimp-Print driver collection

The Gimp-Print project provides a large collection of printer drivers with an IJS interface. Please see their website for details.

MS Windows printers

This section was written by Russell Lang, the author of Ghostscript's MS Windows-specific printer driver, and updated by Pierre Arnaud, the current maintainer.

The mswinpr2 device uses MS Windows printer drivers, and thus should work with any printer with device-independent bitmap (DIB) raster capabilities. The printer resolution cannot be selected directly using PostScript commands from Ghostscript: use the printer setup in the Control Panel instead. It is however possible to specify a maximum resolution for the printed document (see below).


If a Windows printer name is specified in -sOutputFile using the format "%printer%printer_name", for instance

gs ... -sOutputFile="%printer%Apple LaserWriter II NT"


  5. Open the Windows printer with the merged orientation and size.


Supported command-line parameters

The mswinpr2 device supports a limited number of command-line parameters (e.g. it does not support setting the printer resolution). The recognized parameters are the following:

Selects the MS Windows printer device. If Ghostscript was not compiled with this device as the default output device, you have to specify it on the command line.
Hides the progress dialog, which shows the percent of the document page already processed and also provides a cancel button. This option is useful if GS is intended to print pages in the background, without any user intervention.
Specifies which printer should be used. The printer_name should be typed exactly as it appears in the Printers control panel, including spaces.

Supported options (device properties)

Several extra options exist which cannot be set through the command-line, but only by executing the appropriate PostScript setup code. These options can be set through the inclusion of a setup file on the command-line:

gs ... ...

The file is responsible for the device selection, therefore you should not specify the -sDEVICE=mswinpr2 option on the command-line if you are using such a setup file. Here is an example of such a setup file:

  /NoCancel      true                       % don't show the cancel dialog
  /BitsPerPixel  4                          % force 4 bits/pixel
      /DocumentName  (Ghostscript document) % name for the Windows spooler
      /MaxResolution 360                    % maximum document resolution
  (mswinpr2) finddevice                     % select the Windows device driver

This example disables the progress dialog (same as the -dNoCancel option), forces a 4 bits/pixel output resolution and specifies additional user settings, such as the document name (which will be displayed by the Windows spooler for the queued document) and the maximum resolution (here 360 dpi). It then finds and selects an instance of the MS Windows device printer and activates it. This will show the standard printer dialog, since no /OutputFile property was specified.

The following options are available:

/NoCancel boolean
Disables (hides) the progress dialog when set to true or show the progress dialog if not set or set to false.
/OutputFile string
Specifies which printer should be used. The string should be of the form %printer%printer_name, where the printer_name should be typed exactly as it appears in the Printers control panel, including spaces.
/QueryUser integer
Shows the standard printer dialog (1 or any other value), shows the printer setup dialog (2) or selects the default Windows printer without any user interaction (3).
/BitsPerPixel integer
Sets the device depth to the specified bits per pixel. Currently supported values are 1 (monochrome), 4 (CMYK with screening handled by Ghostscript) and 24 (True Color, dithering handled by the Windows printer driver; this option can produce huge print jobs).
/UserSettings dict
Sets additional options, defined in a dictionary. The following properties can be set:
/DocumentName string
Defines the user friendly document name which will be displayed by the Windows spooler.
/DocumentRange [n1 n2]
Defines the range of pages contained in the document. This information can be used by the printer dialog, in conjunction with the following property.
/SelectedRange [n1 n2]
Defines the selected range of pages. This information will be displayed in the printer dialog and will be updated after the user interaction. A PostScript program could check these values and print only the selected page range.
/MaxResolution dpi
Specifies the maximum tolerated output resolution. If the selected printer has a higher resolution than dpi, then Ghostscript will render the document with a submultiple of the printer resolution. For example, if MaxResolution is set to 360 and the output printer supports up to 1200 dpi, then Ghostscript renders the document with an internal resolution of 1200/4=300 dpi. This can be very useful to reduce the memory requirements when printing in True Color on some high resolution ink-jet color printers.

These properties can be queried through the currentpagedevice operator. The following PostScript code snippet shows how to do it for some of the properties:

currentpagedevice /BitsPerPixel get ==  % displays the selected depth

currentpagedevice /UserSettings get     % get the additional options..
/us exch def                            % ..and assign them to a variable

us /DocumentName get ==     % displays the document name
us /SelectedRange get ==    % displays the selected page range

% other misc. information (don't rely on them)

us /Color get ==            % 1 => monochrome output, 2 => color output
us /PrintCopies get ==      % displays the number of copies requested

There are a few undocumented parameters stored in the UserSettings dictionary. You should not rely on them. Their use is still experimental and they could be removed in a future version.

Duplex printing

If the Windows printer supports the duplex printing feature, then it will also be available through the mswinpr2 device. You can query for this support through the /Duplex property of the currentpagedevice. If it returns null, then the feature is not supported by the selected printer. Otherwise, true means that the printer is currently set up to print on both faces of the paper and false that it is not, but that it can.

The following example shows how to print on both faces of the paper (using the long side of the paper as the reference):

<< /Duplex true /Tumble false >> setpagedevice

Sun SPARCprinter

This section was contributed by Martin Schulte.






if [ $# -eq 0 ]
  $outcmd1 | $outcmd2
  cat $* | $outcmd1 | $outcmd2




Note: there is some confusion whether the resolution setting should be the integers 300 and 400, or the symbolic constants DPI300 and DPI400 (defined in lpviio.h). Ghostscript releases have had it both ways. It is currently the latter. However, INOUE Namihiko reports (in bug #215256) that the former works better for him. If anyone has a definitive answer, please let us know.

Apple dot matrix printer

This section was contributed by Mark Wedel <>.





Special and Test devices

The devices in this section are intended primarily for testing. They may be interesting as code examples, as well.

Raw 'bit' devices

There are a collection of 'bit' devices that don't do any special formatting but output 'raw' binary data for the page images. These are used for benchmarking but can also be useful when you want to directly access the raster data.

The raw devices are bit bitrgb bitcmyk.

Bounding box output



It prints the output in a format like this:

%%BoundingBox: 14 37 570 719
%%HiResBoundingBox: 14.308066 37.547999 569.495061 718.319158


By default, white objects don't contribute to the bounding box because many files fill the whole page with white before drawing other objects. This can be changed by:

<< /WhiteIsOpaque true >> setpagedevice



Permutation (DeviceN color model)

With no additional parameters, the device named "permute" looks to Ghostscript like a standard CMYK contone device, and outputs a PPM file, using a simple CMYK->RGB transform. This should be the baseline for regression testing.

With the addition of -dPermute=1, the internal behavior changes somewhat, but in most cases the resulting rendered file should be the same. In this mode, the color model becomes "DeviceN" rather than "DeviceCMYK", the number of components goes to six, and the color model is considered to be the (yellow, cyan, cyan, magenta, 0, black) tuple. This is what's rendered into the memory buffer. Finally, on conversion to RGB for output, the colors are permuted back.

As such, this code should check that all imaging code paths are 64-bit clean. Additionally, it should find incorrect code that assumes that the color model is one of DeviceGray, DeviceRGB, or DeviceCMYK.

Currently, the code has the limitation of 8-bit continuous tone rendering only. An enhancement to do halftones is planned as well. Note, however, that when testing permuted halftones for consistency, it is important to permute the planes of the default halftone accordingly, and that any file which sets halftones explicitly will fail a consistency check.

spotcmyk (DeviceN color model)

The spotcmyk device was created for debugging and testing of the DeviceN extensions to Ghostscript that were released in version 8.0. There are also another device (devicen) in the same source file. It were created for testing however it are not actually useful except as example code.

The spotcmyk device was also designed to provide example code for a device which supports spot colors. Spot colors need to be specified prior to opening the first page. This can be done via adding the following to the command line: -c "<< /SeparationColorNames [ /Name1 /Name2 ] >> setpagedevice" -f.

The spotcmyk device produces a binary data file (similar to the bitcmyk device) for the CMYK data. This data file has the name specified by the "OutputFile" parameter. The device also produces a binary data file (similar to the bitmono device) for each spot color plane. These data files have the name specified by the "OutputFile" parameter with "sn" appended to the end (where "n" is the spot color number 0 to 12)".

After the spotcmyk device produces the binary data files, the files are read and PCX format versions of these files are created with ".pcx" appended to the binary source file name.

If the the spotcmyk is being used with three spot colors and the "OutputFile" parameter is xxx then the following files would be created by the device:

xxx - binary CMYK data
xxxs0 - binary data for first spot color
xxxs1 - binary data for second spot color
xxxs2 - binary data for third spot color
xxx.pcx - CMYK data in PCX format
xxxs0.pcx - first spot color in PCX format
xxxs1.pcx - second spot color in PCX format
xxxs2.pcx - third spot color in PCX format

The spotcmyk device has the creation of the binary data files separated from the creation of the PCX files since the source file is intended as example code and many people may not be interested in the PCX format. The PCX format was chosen because it was simple to implement from preexisting code and viewers are available. The PCX format does have the disadvantage that most of those viewers are on Windows.

XCF (DeviceN color model)

The XCF file format is the native image format for the GIMP program. This format is currently supported by two devices: xcfrgb and xcfcmyk.

We have been warned by the people supporting the GIMP program that they reserve the right to change the XCF format at anytime and thus these devices may become invalid. They are being included in the documentation because we have received some questions about these devices do.

The XCF devices were created for testing of the DeviceN extensions to Ghostscript which were released in version 8.0.

The xcfrgb device uses a DeviceRGB process color model and creates a normal XCF file.

The xcfcmyk device was created as a means of viewing spot colors for those users that do not have access to either Photoshop (see the PSD devices) or a PCX viewer (see the spotcmyk device).

The xcfcmyk device starts by using a DeviceCMYK process color model. The DeviceCMYK process color model allows the xcfcmyk device to also support spot colors. Spot colors need to be specified prior to opening the first page. This can be done via adding the following to the command line: -c "<< /SeparationColorNames [ /Name1 /Name2 ] >> setpagedevice" -f.

After a page is complete, the xcfcmyk converts the CMYK image data into RGB for storing in the XCF output file. The XCF format does not currently support CMYK data directly. The spot color planes are converted into alpha channel planes. This is done because the XCF format does not currently support spot colors.



Ghostscript version 9.06, 8 August 2012