@hackage wumpus-core0.16.0

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).

With revision 0.15.0 I've added three extra helper modules that are not really part of the "core", but they provide lists of named colours and fonts.

THE DRAWBACKS...

For actually drawing pictures, diagrams, etc. Wumpus is very low level. I've worked 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.

With revision 0.14.0, I've added the first draft of a user guide. Source for the guide is included as well as the PDF as there is an extra example picture. wumpus-extra hasn't received any more attention unfortunately, so Wumpus is still really a bit too primitive for general use. However, 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: 0.15.0 to 0.16.0:

• Additions to Core.Geometry (direction, pvec, vangle, circularModulo).

• Fixed error with langle due to not accounting for circle quadrants in Core.Geometry.

• Point2 now derives Ord - so it can be used as a key for Data.Map.

• Added escape-character handling to text output in PostScript. This was causing a nasty bug where a drawing would completely fail when special chars shown (GhostView gives little hint of what is wrong when such errors are present).

• Changed BoundingBox operation corners to return a 4-tuple rather than a list.

• Added centeredAt to PictureLanguage

1. 14.0 to 0.15.0:

• Added Named colours and "safe fonts" from wumpus-extra.

• Added wumpus_core_version to track version number.