Installation and Configuration of Ghostscript

Ghostscript is needed by Scribus for two purposes, namely the print preview (File > Print Preview) and the rasterisation of EPS files in image frames. If you don't need one of those features, you can safely ignore the warning message displayed by Scribus in case Ghostscript isn't installed.

Contrary to some reports in the press, Ghostscript is not required for PDF or EPS export, since Scribus has its own code to handle this feature.

Recommended/required Ghostscript versions

Generally speaking, you want to have the latest ghostscript you can find. You should find anything since 8.60 to be serviceable, but as of this writing the current version is 8.71. As far as we know, you cannot go wrong by potentially having some "too far advanced" version of Ghostscript.

Installing Ghostscript as a binary on Linux/UNIX

This is by far the most sensible way. Most of the "mainstream" Linux distros will have Ghostscript in their repositories, so if you don't have it, simply search for it. If you don't know how to work with your repositories, you might as well forget about Ghostscript, since you have or are going to have far more important issues than that.

A particular advantage of the repository method is that once you install it, it will keep itself up to date.

Installing Ghostscript on Mac OS X

Ghostscript DMGs

The short path to Mac dmgs seems to be this one:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/

Read the About Ghostscript 8.71 file to get a sense of what is included, which is different versions for whatever recent MacOS version you might have.