Poscript Library Project - linux.techass.com

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Postcript Utility Library

What is it?

Not much yet! :) It is intended to be a library which allows manipulation and generation of Postscript files as well as font management.

Currently it supports:

Conversion of Postscript Type1 fonts from binary to ascii (and vice versa). This is required to print fonts in .pfb files.
Conversion of True Type fonts to Postscript Type 42 (for inclusion in a postscript file). This is required to print True Type fonts.
Conversion of True Type fonts to Postscript Type 1 (for inclusion in a postscript file). This is required to print True Type fonts on older (and buggy) printers.
Parsing and interpretation of Adobe Font Metric files. This is required to know how big those characters in a .pfa or .pfb file are.

The whole idea here is to create a library to facilitate printing on the Linux/Unix platform. Printing on this platform seems to come down to generation of postscript files. Right now I am concentrating on fonts and more specifically X fonts and Postscript fonts and their relationship. With this library you will be able to list fonts available for printing under Postscript and/or display under X, and map between the two.

Further in the future, I plan to add functions to "draw" into PostScript files.

Current Status

Currently, I am jamming out code with one hand while grabbing others code with the other hand, all the while trying to develop a coherent API.

I desperately need help with Unicode, font encodings, and drawing under Postscript. Someone with experience with Postscript to design the drawing API would really be great. However, any help would be appreciated.

Documentation

Current Doxygen Generated Docs

Be sure to checkout out the Modules section!

Downloads

Until SourceForge gets anonymous CVS fixed, here is a semi-currrent snapshot:

ps-0.0.1.tar.gz (12/11/00): Note: you will also need ttf2pt1 which is available from their website (most current) or locally ttf2pt1-3.3.2.tgz.

CVS Access

Please see the SourceForge page for more info.

Mailing Lists

Please see the SourceForge page for more info.

Known Bugs and ToDo's

Please see the SourceForge page for more info.

Developer Info

We need developers! If you are interested please contact the project manager, Derry Bryson at derry@techass.com, directly. If you would like CVS write access, you will need a SourceForge ID and SSH/SSL support setup (see the documentation at SourceForge).

If you don't want to become an "official" developer, patches and bug reports are also welcomed.

If you want to become an official developer, I would suggest obtaining and familiarizing yourself with the current version from CVS and monitoring and reviewing the archives from the developers mailing list.

License

LGPL

Credits

Contact

Please direct all questions, comments, bug reports, bug fixes, etc. to the appropriate mailing list.

All other correspondance (including problems with this web page) should be directed to Derry Bryson at derry@techass.com