Ghostscript has introduced a completely rewritten implementation of its PDF interpreter, which is now implemented in C instead of PostScript. This has a lot of advantages besides the performance improvements. For third-party applications like dvisvgm, however, this change has significant impact on the functions that can be provided. dvisvgm relies on the possibility to overwrite PostScript and PDF operators in order to directly communicate with the interpreter. The nice thing about the current PostScript-based PDF interpreter is the fact that both PostScript and PDF code can be treated almost equally.

As of Ghostscript 9.56.0, this will no longer be possible, and as far as I can tell from the documentation, there is no way to replicate the current functionality. As a consequence, all PDF functionality currently available in dvisvgm will no longer work with the upcoming Ghostscript releases. Therefore, it will require the parallel installation of Ghostscript 9.55.0 or earlier. In the long run, I’ll probably have to drop PDF support since I don’t have the resources to implement a completely new PDF handler.

• Added transparency support for SVG elements created outside the PS handler (issue #148).
• Fixed a spacing issue caused by unexpected newline characters in SVG output.
• Fixed PostScript errors occurred when defining (yet unsupported) shading patterns.
• Fixed a bug that prevented proper coloring of PostScript tiling patterns (issue #158).
• Fixed graphics displacements that occurred if the PDF MediBox is not located at the origin.
• Fixed the handling of root directories of file paths.
• Improved the handling of drive letters (Windows only).
• Several code refactorings and improvements.

This is a small maintenance release.

• Fixed possible ambiguities of GID to charcode mappings (issue #147).
• Refactored the representation of token objects in class Calculator.
• Few minor code and test improvements.

• Added fallback mechanism for JFM-based virtual fonts as proposed by Takuji Tanaka (issue #144).
• Improved detection of proper CMap files for currently selected font encoding.
• Fixed processing of Unicode surrogates present in CMap files.
• Fixed handling of pdf:mapline and pdf:mapfile specials.

This is a small maintenance release.

• Added support for the new Ghostscript transparency operators .setfillconstantalpha and .setstrokeconstantalpha.
• Added support for the new Ghostscript versioning scheme introduced with GS 9.53.0.
• Added few additional information to the manual page.
• Updated the bundled Brotli library to version 1.0.9.

This is a maintenance release with the following additions and changes:

• Added evaluation of LuaT_EX native font definitions.
• Added computation of of italic correction for fake slanted glyphs.
• dvisvgm now creates dedicated temporary folders for each call of the program to prevent file collisions between different processes.
• Added evaluation of internal Ghostscript operators .fillstroke and .eofillstroke introduced with GS 9.52 to implement PDF operators B and B* (issue #139).
• Fixed and improved optimization of nested group elements.
• Fixed optimization of scale transformation.
• Fixed optimization of transform attributes applied to images and clipping paths.
• Fixed processing of PostScript operator eoclip.
• Fixed processing of clipping path intersections that involve different fill rules.
• Fixed processing of {?(...)} expressions (issue #136).
• Fixed error message about unmatched closing tags in XML parser.
• Updated bundled FreeType library to version 2.10.2.
• Updated bundled xxHash library to version 0.8.

This is a small maintenance release with the following changes:

• Added macro {?(expr)} to enable the evaluation of math expressions in raw SVG fragments (issue #130).
• Multiplication operator * preceding an opening parentheses can now be omitted in math expressions.
• Fixed the evaluation of transformation command scale(c) which is now correctly treated as scale(c,c) (issue #131).
• Minor layout optimizations of the PDF version of the manual page.

The main new feature of this release is the conversion of bitmap images present in PostScript and PDF data. All bitmaps are embedded into the generated SVG files encoded as Base64 strings. The default format used for this is JPEG because it allows for high compression rates and therefore moderate impact on the SVG file size. If you prefer a lossless format, you can switch to one of the supported PNG variants by using the new command-line option --bitmap-format. Further information about the available formats and the usage of this option can be found on the manual page.

Summary of additions and fixes:

• Added the processing of PostScript operators image and colorimage which now allows dvisvgm to embed bitmap images present in PS/PDF files into the generated SVG files.
• Added command-line option --bitmap-format to set the format used to embed bitmaps present in EPS/PDF files.
• Added a fallback method to retrieve the resolution of GF files if stdout of the Metafont subprocess can’t be read through a pipe for some reason (issue #129).
• Fixed the broken conversion of PostScript tiling patterns.
• Fixed the functionality of PostScript operators xshow, yshow, and xyshow for multibyte characters.
• Fixed a PostScript error that was triggered by yet unsupported shading types < 4.
• Prevent negative height and width attributes created by optimizer module simplify-transform.
• Fixed a potential segfault caused by deep recursion in huge SVG trees.
• Look for Ghostscript library name libgs.dylib.N additionally to libgs.N.dylib (Mac only).
• Ensure that make install installs the bundled manual page if it can’t be rebuilt due to missing build tools.
• Updated the bundled xxHash library to version 0.7.3.