Ghostview

Ghostview is a graphical user interface for viewing PostScript and PDF documents by using the Ghostscript interpreter as its rendering engine. As a front-end, it submits pages to Ghostscript and displays the raster output, providing a simple, interactive viewer for PostScript, EPS, and PDF files. It is most closely associated with Unix-like systems running the X Window System, though variants and ports have appeared for other platforms.

Historically, Ghostview served as a common, lightweight PostScript viewer on desktop systems and was widely distributed with Ghostscript. Variants include GV for X11 environments and Windows front-ends such as GSview, which offer similar functionality on non-Unix platforms. These tools share the same underlying rendering via Ghostscript, differing mainly in user interface and platform integration.

Key features typically include page navigation (forward and backward), zooming and panning, page rotation, printing, and basic text selection or copying. Rendering quality and capabilities depend on the installed Ghostscript version and its support for fonts and graphics operators. Because Ghostview relies on Ghostscript, it inherits its broad format support and font handling rather than implementing rendering itself.

In the broader ecosystem, Ghostview is part of the legacy of Ghostscript-based viewing tools. While modern document viewers and inline PDF readers have supplanted many classic front-ends for everyday use, Ghostview remains cited in historical discussions of Unix desktop software and the evolution of PostScript/PDF viewing tools. See also Ghostscript.