wumpus-core: Pure Haskell PostScript and SVG generation.

Wumpus - (W)riter (M)onad (P)ost (S)cript.

Wumpus is a library for generating 2D vector pictures, its salient feature is portability due to no FFI dependencies. It can generate PostScript (EPS) files and SVG files. The generated PostScript code is plain [1] and quite efficient (no unnecessary stack operations).

Pictures in Wumpus are made from paths and text labels. Paths themselves are made from points. The usual affine transformations (rotations, scaling, translations) can be applied to all geometric objects. Unlike PostScript there is no notion of a current point, Wumpus builds pictures in a coordinate-free style. There is a set of combinators for composing pictures (more-or-less similar to the usual pretty printing combinators).

THE DRAWBACKS...

For actually drawing pictures, diagrams, etc. Wumpus is very low level. I am working on a complementary package wumpus-extra with higher-level stuff (polygons, arrows etc.) but it is too unstable for Hackage. Preview releases can be found at http://code.google.com/p/copperbox/ though.

Wumpus-core should be fairly stable from now on. There may be some name changes etc. that will change interfaces, but Wumpus has been carefully implemented. Some of the design decisions are not sophisticated (e.g. how attributes like colour are handled, and how the bounding boxes of text labels are calculated), so Wumpus might be limited compared to other systems. However its design permits a simple implementation - which is a priority. Text encoding an exception, I'm not sure how reasonable the design is. The current implementation appears okay for Latin 1 but I'm not sure about other character sets, and I may have to revise it significantly.

There is no documentation - the graphics model used by Wumpus is different to PostScript or SVG, and Wumpus really needs a manual. Unfortunately there isn't one yet, and I will be focusing on wumpus-extra for the foreseeable future; so a manual won't be written soon. If you want FFI-free vector graphics and Wumpus seems to otherwise fit the task, please email me and I will try to help.

\[1\] Because the output is simple, straight-line PostScript code, it is possible to use GraphicsMagick or a similar tool to convert Wumpus's EPS files to many other formats (bitmaps).

Changelog:

1. 13.0 to 0.13.1:

• Wumpus.Core.SVG changed path_s to path_c - 'S' was the wrongSVG command to match PostScript's curveto.

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[Index]

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• wumpus-core-0.13.1.tar.gz [browse] (Cabal source package)
• Package description (revised from the package)

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• StephenTetley

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