Re: LASi 1.0.4 Postscript Printing Engine Announcement

["Edward H. Trager" <ehtrager@xxxxxxxxx>]

Announcement: 

  LASi v. 1.0.4, A Unicode-based Postscript Printing Library.
  http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/lasi/

Hi, everyone,

 I would like to announce the release of LASi v. 1.0.4, a Unicode-based
 Postscript printing engine.  LASi was written by Larry Siden and  provides 
 a C++ stream output interface ( with operator " << " ) for creating Postscript 
 documents that can contain characters from any of the scripts and symbol blocks 
 supported in Unicode and by Owen Taylor's Pango layout engine.

 Here's an abbreviated sample of what LASi provides. As you can see, LASi preserves
 the ability to use Postscript operators like "moveto" and "showpage" directly 
 -- these are simply written to the stream unchanged.  What LASi provides 
 are methods like "setFont()", "setFontSize()", and "show()" which allow you to
 use TrueType and OpenType fonts and Unicode UTF-8 text strings in any script supported
 by Unicode and by Pango with the same simplicity that Postscript's "show" operator
 provides for basic Postscript:
 
    LASi::PostscriptDocument doc;
    doc.osBody() << setFont("serif") << setFontSize(18);
    // Text strings are in UTF-8:
    char testString[]="Hello 你好";
    doc.osBody() << "100 600 moveto" << std::endl;
    doc.osBody() << show(testString);
    doc.osBody() << "showpage" << std::endl;
    doc.write(cout);

 Although the capability to produce Unicode-based multilingual Postscript documents 
 exists in large Open Source application framework libraries such as GTK+, QT, and KDE, 
 LASi was designed for projects which require the ability to produce Postscript 
 independent of any one application framework, or independent of a GUI toolkit.  The
 only dependencies are Pango, glib, and FreeType2.  Also, since the stream output
 interface is so easy to use, developers using other toolkits might want to experiment
 with LASi's simplicity anyway.

 As I have now assumed maintainership of this library and have recently, along with my
 colleague Ritu Khanna, spent a fair amount of time eliminating bugs
 and trying to formalize the API and documentation, I
 would greatly appreciate constructive criticism from anyone and everyone who might have
 time to take a look at this fairly small but very convenient library.

 Happy Holidays!

 - Ed Trager <ehtrager@xxxxxxxxx>
   Kellogg Eye Center
   University of Michigan
   Ann Arbor


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