Ubuntu – What’s the easiest way to upgrade Ghostscript

As an alternative solution - you could compile the older version of ghostscript.

download and extract the tar file

Download the tar file from launchpad.

setup the build environment

sudo apt-get build-dep ghostscript-x

compile and install ghostscript

cd [ghostscript folder location]
sh autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

binaries

All the binaries are installed in /usr/local/bin

Thus if you run gs -v:

GPL Ghostscript 8.71 (2010-02-10) Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

If you want to run ghostscript you can reassign the current symbolic link:

sudo rm /usr/bin/ghostscript
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/gs /usr/bin/ghostscript

What do you want to do is not possible. At least not without making your system broken.

You can't install the Vivid version of ghostscript in Trusty. The package has some dependencies and one of them is libgs9 (= 9.15+dfsg-0ubuntu2.1). The version for libgs9 in Trusty is libgs9 (9.10~dfsg-0ubuntu10.4). Therefore, forget it. :)

Repair your system via

sudo apt-get install -f

In the meantime you could try this PPA

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:anton+/photo-video-apps
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ghostscript