RHBA-2015:1343 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated ghostscript packages that fix several bugs are now available for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6.

Description

The Ghostscript suite contains utilities for rendering PostScript and PDF
documents. Ghostscript translates PostScript code to common, bitmap formats so
that the code can be displayed or printed.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• Previously, a text intended for rendering in mode 3 (invisible) was not

included in the PDF output of the pdfwrite device. As a consequence, text
selection from documents with an invisible text, such as Optical character
recognition (OCR) output, failed. With this update, mode 3 text is included in
the PDF output, and copying a text from such PDF files now works as expected.
(BZ#994452)

• Prior to this update, some PDF files containing embedded objects were

erroneously treated as portable collections, leading to a "/syntaxerror" error
when processing these files. A fix has been applied so that only PDF files with
"/Collection" attributes are treated as portable collections, and files with
embedded objects are now processed correctly. (BZ#1027534)

• Correct PDF/A files could not be created due to a lack of support. This update

backports improved support for creating PDF/A files from upstream, and correct
PDF/A files can now be produced. (BZ#1060026)

• Previously, if an error occurred in the ghostscript interpreter in between

allocating an array and initializing its contents, garbage collection
could cause the interpreter to terminate unexpectedly while attempting to
deallocate memory. A patch from upstream which immediately sets the array
elements to null objects after allocation fixes this bug, and the ghostscript
interpreter no longer crashes in the described scenario. (BZ#1105520)

Users of ghostscript are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which fix
these bugs.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously released errata
relevant to your system have been applied.

For details on how to apply this update, refer to:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 6 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 6 ppc64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Scientific Computing 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 6 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server - Extended Life Cycle Support (for IBM z Systems) 6 s390x

Fixes

• BZ - 994452 - Invisible text not preserved by pdfwrite
• BZ - 1027534 - Ghostscript gives unrecoverable errors on some PDF files

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)