[Scribus] ghostscript-esp vs. ghostscript-afpl vs. ghostscript-gnu

[Sebastian Roeder]

Today I come up with some ghostscript questions and hope someone can 
shet a light on this - it's about different ghostscript versions.

For normal office used I did never care about ghostscript - the distros 
normaly use a ghostscript-esp (at that time version 7.x) that is under 
GPL and works togehter with non-postscript printers and CUPS. The ESP 
suffix seems to be for Epson who started to make ghostscript-afpl 
non-postscript printer complient. (Note: There is currently 8.15.rc3 on 
the Cups HP).

When I worked with Scribus I was often recommended to use 
ghostscript-afpl instead, which is always more up to date (e.g. 8.15) 
and can be used for free (as in free beer) under the Aladin License. 
However this seems not to be the latest (stable) development. The latest 
version (e.g. 8.51) seems to be non-free, one has to pay a licence fee 
for it.

To make confusion even worse there is ghostcript-gnu:

http://www.gnu.org/software/ghostscript/

The ghostscript main page points out that this was the name of 
ghostscript-gpl until 2004, but they have a new 8.16 release now.

OK, I am using ghostcript-afpl-8.15 atm on Gentoo with regard to best 
Scribus results - this means I have to print my everyday docs on WinXP 
because of the "CUPS-non-postscript-incompatiblety".

My questions are which ghostscript-* version is best for Scribus (and 
what the hell is the difference between the gnu one and the others) and 
maybe what I can do to get my printer to work + best Scribus results. As 
a sidenote, the printer is PCL aware (Brother HL5140 laserprinter).

And please correct me if I gave a wrong summary ;-)

Regards,
Sebastian