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Ghostscript vs ImageMagick: What are the differences?

Ghostscript and ImageMagick are both popular software applications used for manipulating images and documents. While they share some similarities, there are several key differences between them.

  1. Command Line Interface: Ghostscript primarily operates through the command line interface (CLI), which allows users to control and modify images and documents using command prompt commands. On the other hand, ImageMagick not only offers CLI but also provides a graphical user interface (GUI), making it more accessible for users who prefer a visual interface.

  2. Supported File Formats: Ghostscript supports a wide range of file formats, including PDF, EPS, PS, XPS, and various image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and TIFF. However, its main focus is on document-related formats. Conversely, ImageMagick supports a vast array of image formats, including popular ones like JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP, providing more versatility in image manipulation.

  3. Primary Function: Ghostscript primarily focuses on document manipulation tasks, such as converting documents between different formats, extracting pages, or merging multiple documents into one. In contrast, ImageMagick is mainly designed for image processing tasks like resizing, cropping, adding text or effects, and image format conversion.

  4. Image Editing Capabilities: ImageMagick offers a broad range of built-in image editing capabilities, including color correction, watermarking, morphing, and applying various effects and filters. Ghostscript, on the other hand, has limited image editing capabilities, mainly focusing on document-related operations rather than extensive image manipulation.

  5. Dependencies: Ghostscript is a standalone software that only requires the installation of Ghostscript itself to function. ImageMagick, however, relies on Ghostscript as one of its dependencies, meaning Ghostscript needs to be installed alongside ImageMagick for certain operations that require document handling.

  6. Scripting Language Integration: ImageMagick provides native scripting language support, allowing users to automate and batch process images using scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. In contrast, Ghostscript predominantly uses PostScript and PDF interpreters for scripting and automation, making it more suitable for document-centric tasks.

In summary, Ghostscript is focused on document manipulation through a command line interface, while ImageMagick is primarily used for image processing and offers a graphical user interface. Ghostscript supports various document formats, whereas ImageMagick excels in a wide range of image formats. ImageMagick provides more extensive image editing capabilities and supports scripting languages, while Ghostscript offers more limited image manipulation features and relies on Ghostscript as a dependency for certain operations.

Advice on Ghostscript and ImageMagick
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GhostscriptGhostscriptOpenPDFOpenPDF
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PDF.jsPDF.js

Users are uploading huge PDF files of more than 100MB on our platform. We are creating several tools to manage those files, but keeping the raw file will eat up space, as we are handling several of them. After upload, they will be mainly keep stored for future use.

I am looking for a tool to compress and optimize those PDFs, like a library or an external API that can process that for us.

Thanks

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Replies (2)
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BunnyCDNBunnyCDN

You can store raw files on a cdn service like bunnyCdn. If they want to work with the raw files, you can get it from the cdn service. Compressing is not a persistent solution for space problem. Also it's more safe way, because cdn providers copy your files more than one servers..

Modern cdn solutions have ftp / ssh support so you can easily send files to them...

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Andres Montalban
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GhostscriptGhostscript

I have been using Ghostscript and Python to get JPEG images from PDF files and that way we have reduced PDF size. But if your average is 100MB then probably those are hi-res images and not sure if your users will accept a quality reduction.

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What is Ghostscript?

It is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and PDF page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files.

What is ImageMagick?

It is a free and open-source software suite for displaying, converting, and editing raster image and vector image files. It can read and write images in a variety of formats (over 200) including PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF, and SVG.

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What are some alternatives to Ghostscript and ImageMagick?
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wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the QT Webkit rendering engine. These run entirely "headless" and do not require a display or display service.
pdfmake
pdfmake, client/server side PDF printing in pure JavaScript.
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