MacGhostView is a general purpose Postscript and PDF previewer for the Macintosh and is based on ghostscript 7.05. If a Postscript document conforms to Adobe's Document Structuring Conventions, the pages of the document can be displayed in any order. The program includes installation and registration instructions. MacGhostView is shareware with a one-time $20(US) registration fee. You can pay online with a credit card through PayPal or Kagi Shareware. See the User Guide for further details.
Starting with OS 10.3 Apple's Preview application can "display" Postscript files. Each time you try to view a Postscript with Preview it is converted to PDF and the PDF file is displayed, not the original Postscript file. Since conversion can be quite slow, MacGhostView is much faster at displaying Postscript files.
Included with MacGhostView is macps2pdf, an interface to Unix ghostscript which can be used to convert Postscript files to other formats. Beginning with version 6.0 ghostscript is capable of embedding Type1 fonts in a PDF document, making it a viable alternative to Adobe's Distiller. Prior to 6.0 ghostscript could only convert Type1 fonts to bitmaps, resulting in PDF documents which displayed poorly in Acrobat Reader. MacGhostView includes a complete installation of Unix ghostscript 8.70, which is used by macps2pdf. Any version of ghostscript later than 6.0 can be used with macps2pdf.
MacGhostView is a large program and can require huge amounts of RAM if you want to preview documents in color and at high resolution. MacGhostView requires Mac OS 10.4 or later.
All of the applications included with MacGhostView are Universal Binaries except the MacGhostView application itself. I have not been able to produce an Intel version of the MacGhostView application that runs under 10.5. MacGhostView is a 35 Mb download and can be downloaded by clicking here.
MacGhostView is configured to display a document at 288 dpi with 256 colors. These settings require an offscreen bitmap using 7.4 MB of RAM and give you magnifications of 100%, 133%, 200%, and 400%. The amount of RAM needed for the offscreen bitmap can be greatly reduced by lowering the dpi or the number of colors in the “Display Page Geometry” item under the Options Menu. The size the offscreen bitmap determines the speed at which MacGhostView displays a page.
If you have a Postscript printer, check the documentation that comes with your printer driver to see how to print a Postscript document directly. If you do not have a Postscript printer you can use macps2pdf to convert the Postscript document to PDF and print the PDF document from Acrobat Reader.
Last updated: January 2010