Ghostscript vs GraphicsMagick

Overview

GraphicsMagick

Stacks25

Followers65

Votes4

Ghostscript

Stacks12

Followers20

Votes0

Ghostscript vs GraphicsMagick: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Ghostscript and GraphicsMagick are both open-source software programs that are used for manipulating and converting images. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two.

Command-Line Interface vs. API Usage: Ghostscript primarily functions as a command-line tool that allows users to interact with it through the command prompt or terminal. On the other hand, GraphicsMagick provides APIs that can be integrated into programming languages such as C, C++, Perl, and Ruby, allowing developers to incorporate its functionalities directly into their code.
PostScript Language Processing: Ghostscript excels in processing PostScript and PDF files. It can interpret and render complex PostScript programming languages, making it a powerful tool for handling advanced printing and document-related tasks. GraphicsMagick, while capable of handling PostScript files, focuses more on image manipulation and optimization rather than comprehensive document handling.
Image Manipulation Features: GraphicsMagick offers an extensive range of image manipulation features, including resizing, cropping, rotating, filtering, compositing, and more. It provides a rich set of image processing options and filters that can be applied to images. While Ghostscript also has some image manipulation capabilities, it is not as extensive or specialized as the ones provided by GraphicsMagick.
Image Format Support: Ghostscript is primarily designed for working with PostScript and PDF files, making them its core strengths. It excels at converting these formats to other output formats. GraphicsMagick, on the other hand, is more focused on image formats and supports a wide range of formats, including popular ones like JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, and more. It can be used for converting, creating, and editing various image formats.
Multi-threading and Performance: GraphicsMagick is designed to take advantage of multi-threading and can run multiple operations simultaneously for performance optimization. This makes it particularly suitable for high-performance environments and applications that require faster image processing. Ghostscript, while it can achieve parallel processing through separate instances, does not have built-in multi-threading support, resulting in potential performance differences when compared to GraphicsMagick.
Application Focus: Ghostscript primarily serves as a versatile PostScript and PDF interpreter, focusing on print-related applications and document handling. It is commonly used for tasks such as printing, converting, and modifying PostScript and PDF files. GraphicsMagick, on the other hand, focuses on general-purpose image processing and manipulation. It is often used in web development, digital media, and other image-centric applications.

In summary, Ghostscript and GraphicsMagick differ in their interface usage, focus on PostScript language processing, image manipulation features, image format support, multi-threading capabilities, and application focus. While both are powerful tools for handling images, their specific strengths and areas of expertise make them suitable for different use cases.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on GraphicsMagick, Ghostscript

Cesar

Jun 24, 2020

Needs advice

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

20.8k views20.8k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

GraphicsMagick	Ghostscript
GraphicsMagick is the swiss army knife of image processing. Comprised of 267K physical lines (according to David A. Wheeler's SLOCCount) of source code in the base package (or 1,225K including 3rd party libraries) it provides a robust and efficient collection of tools and libraries which support reading, writing, and manipulating an image in over 88 major formats including important formats like DPX, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PNM, and TIFF.	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.
Statistics
Stacks 25	Stacks 12
Followers 65	Followers 20
Votes 4	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 4 Used by flickr and etsy	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	PHP Ruby Java

What are some alternatives to GraphicsMagick, Ghostscript?

Cloudinary

Cloudinary is a cloud-based service that streamlines websites and mobile applications' entire image and video management needs - uploads, storage, administration, manipulations, and delivery.

imgix

imgix is the leading platform for end-to-end visual media processing. With robust APIs, SDKs, and integrations, imgix empowers developers to optimize, transform, manage, and deliver images and videos at scale through simple URL parameters.

OpenCV

OpenCV was designed for computational efficiency and with a strong focus on real-time applications. Written in optimized C/C++, the library can take advantage of multi-core processing. Enabled with OpenCL, it can take advantage of the hardware acceleration of the underlying heterogeneous compute platform.

ImageKit

ImageKit offers a real-time URL-based API for image & video optimization, streaming, and 50+ transformations to deliver perfect visual experiences on websites and apps. It also comes integrated with a Digital Asset Management solution.

Cloudimage

Effortless image resizing, optimization and CDN delivery. Make your site fully responsive and really fast.

scikit-image

scikit-image is a collection of algorithms for image processing.

Kraken.io

It supports JPEG, PNG and GIF files. You can optimize your images in two ways - by providing an URL of the image you want to optimize or by uploading an image file directly to its API.

ImageEngine

ImageEngine is an intelligent Image CDN that dynamically optimizes image content tailored to the end users device. Using device intelligence at the CDN edge, developers can greatly simplify their image management process while accelerating their site.

FFMPEG

The universal multimedia toolkit.

DocRaptor

DocRaptor makes it easy to convert HTML to PDF and XLS format. Choose your document format, select configuration options and make an HTTP POST request to our server. DocRaptor returns your file in a matter of seconds. We provide extensive documentation and examples to get you started, and our API makes it easy to use DocRaptor to generate PDF and Excel files in your own web applications.

Related Comparisons

Ghostscript vs GraphicsMagick: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Command-Line Interface vs. API Usage: Ghostscript primarily functions as a command-line tool that allows users to interact with it through the command prompt or terminal. On the other hand, GraphicsMagick provides APIs that can be integrated into programming languages such as C, C++, Perl, and Ruby, allowing developers to incorporate its functionalities directly into their code.
PostScript Language Processing: Ghostscript excels in processing PostScript and PDF files. It can interpret and render complex PostScript programming languages, making it a powerful tool for handling advanced printing and document-related tasks. GraphicsMagick, while capable of handling PostScript files, focuses more on image manipulation and optimization rather than comprehensive document handling.
Image Manipulation Features: GraphicsMagick offers an extensive range of image manipulation features, including resizing, cropping, rotating, filtering, compositing, and more. It provides a rich set of image processing options and filters that can be applied to images. While Ghostscript also has some image manipulation capabilities, it is not as extensive or specialized as the ones provided by GraphicsMagick.
Image Format Support: Ghostscript is primarily designed for working with PostScript and PDF files, making them its core strengths. It excels at converting these formats to other output formats. GraphicsMagick, on the other hand, is more focused on image formats and supports a wide range of formats, including popular ones like JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, and more. It can be used for converting, creating, and editing various image formats.
Multi-threading and Performance: GraphicsMagick is designed to take advantage of multi-threading and can run multiple operations simultaneously for performance optimization. This makes it particularly suitable for high-performance environments and applications that require faster image processing. Ghostscript, while it can achieve parallel processing through separate instances, does not have built-in multi-threading support, resulting in potential performance differences when compared to GraphicsMagick.
Application Focus: Ghostscript primarily serves as a versatile PostScript and PDF interpreter, focusing on print-related applications and document handling. It is commonly used for tasks such as printing, converting, and modifying PostScript and PDF files. GraphicsMagick, on the other hand, focuses on general-purpose image processing and manipulation. It is often used in web development, digital media, and other image-centric applications.

Ghostscript vs GraphicsMagick

Overview