[pre-announce, call for contributors] cl-typesetting

Marc Battyani

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Oct 20, 2003, 5:14:59 PM10/20/03

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I've not finished cl-typesetting enough to release it yet but I've done
enough of the core typesetting engine to start to send it to people wanting
to contribute to it.

At the beginning of this project I just wanted something more modern and
extensible than TeX but I thought that TeX itself was a rather distant and
not really attainable goal. Now that I have worked on the subject, I'm pretty
confident that this goal is really not far away. I mean it can be a matter of
months not years. IMO at this stage, cl-typesetting is already much more
flexible and extensible than TeX and has almost the same typographic quality.
No multi-lines hyphenation yet, but for instance it's possible to easily find
rivers (see the example) and implement a better vertical mode (which is a
weaker point of TeX). cl-typesetting already have some goodies like native
modern table support (à la HTML) with nested tables etc.

cl-typesetting will be released under a BSD style licence.

Now what is needed is a lot of packages and higher level functionalities
built on cl-typesetting.

Contribution areas are multiple. Here is a non exhaustive list of what would
be interesting:

-User friendly syntaxes above the core syntax layer. (TeX syntax emulation,
markup languages, alternative languages like Scribble, etc...)

-Completing the tables. (multipage support, more options for the cells, etc.)

-Completing the math mode and adding standard math-syntaxes (TeX, mathML)

-Adding commands for things like lists, enumerated lists, choosing the
hyphenation language, etc.

-Improving the styles handling (paragraph, titles styles etc.)

-Adding higher level processing functions like tables of content, indexes,
sections/subsections numbering, etc.

-Adding stuff for easily defining headers, footers, the page dimensions, and
margins, etc.

-Completing and improving the core typesetting engine. (multi-lines
hyphenation, rivers, grid-mode, etc.)

-Native integration and improvement of the cl-pdf charts (pie, histogram,
lines, etc.)

-Making typesetting server (webservice ?) so that non-lispers can use it.

-etc.

Just email me if you are interested.

The well known example of what cl-typesetting already does is here:
http://www.fractalconcept.com/ex.pdf
(I've added brute force rivers highlighting in one block)

Marc

Joost Kremers

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Oct 20, 2003, 5:31:44 PM10/20/03

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Marc Battyani wrote:
> The well known example of what cl-typesetting already does is here:
> http://www.fractalconcept.com/ex.pdf

FWIW, when i try to open this example in gv, i get an error when gv tries
to display the fourth box (the one at the bottom right). the last text that
does appear is "Kerning test \\ Yes AWAY \\ Basic Math Mode Test"

the error message is:

Error: /syntaxerror in --%ztokenexec_continue--

then follows a dump of the operand stack, which i can post if you like.

gv version 3.5.8
ESP Ghostscript 7.05.6 (2003-02-05)

platform: slackware linux 8.1 (with teTeX and ghostscript from 9.1
packages) on powerpc.

i don't know if this is a problem on my end or a bug in cl-typesetting, but
i thought you might want to know.

--
Joost Kremers
since when is vi an editor? a discussion on vi belongs in
comp.tools.unusable or something... ;-)

Marc Battyani

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Oct 20, 2003, 5:44:26 PM10/20/03

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"Joost Kremers" <joostk...@yahoo.com> wrote

> Marc Battyani wrote:
> > The well known example of what cl-typesetting already does is here:
> > http://www.fractalconcept.com/ex.pdf
>
> FWIW, when i try to open this example in gv, i get an error when gv tries
> to display the fourth box (the one at the bottom right). the last text that
> does appear is "Kerning test \\ Yes AWAY \\ Basic Math Mode Test"
>
> the error message is:
>
> Error: /syntaxerror in --%ztokenexec_continue--
>
> then follows a dump of the operand stack, which i can post if you like.
>
> gv version 3.5.8
> ESP Ghostscript 7.05.6 (2003-02-05)
>
> platform: slackware linux 8.1 (with teTeX and ghostscript from 9.1
> packages) on powerpc.
>
> i don't know if this is a problem on my end or a bug in cl-typesetting, but
> i thought you might want to know.

Looks like it's a font problem. (I used the TeX fonts for the math mode) So
it can be either a cl-pdf bug, a bad font file or a Ghostscipt bug. Have you
tried to look it with another viewer ?

Marc

Joost Kremers

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Oct 20, 2003, 6:43:34 PM10/20/03

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Marc Battyani wrote:
> Looks like it's a font problem. (I used the TeX fonts for the math mode) So
> it can be either a cl-pdf bug, a bad font file or a Ghostscipt bug. Have you
> tried to look it with another viewer ?

xpdf seems to display it fine. this is what i get:

<http://members.chello.nl/~j.kremers4/window.png>

although it does output two errors:

Error (38828): Bad DCT Adobe APP14 marker
Error (71212): Bad DCT Adobe APP14 marker

i can't test with acrobat reader, because there's no version of it for
linux/ppc...

Alan Crowe

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Oct 20, 2003, 6:58:14 PM10/20/03

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I'm getting the same problem with Ghostscript 6.52.
Actually same picture, slightly different error message

Error: /undefined in 飖静竍+

I've typeset some mathematics on my system,

TeX -> dvi2ps -> hp deskjet.

so I think that ghostscript is able to find TeX maths fonts OK.

Alan Crowe

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk

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Oct 20, 2003, 7:00:52 PM10/20/03

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On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 22:43:34 +0000, Joost Kremers wrote:

> xpdf seems to display it fine.

Acrobat Reader too, and it converted it to a postscript which printed
successfully.

--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk
\__/ qrc...@knm.org.pl
^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/

frr

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Oct 21, 2003, 5:33:03 AM10/21/03

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On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 23:14:59 +0200, "Marc Battyani"
<Marc.B...@fractalconcept.com> wrote:

Does it always output pdf?

Marc Battyani

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Oct 21, 2003, 5:48:44 AM10/21/03

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"Alan Crowe" <al...@cawNOtech.freeSPAMserve.co.uk> wrote

The TeX font is embedded in the pdf file, it seems that ghostscript does not
like what it find inside.

Marc

Marc Battyani

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Oct 21, 2003, 5:49:14 AM10/21/03

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"frr" <frr...@telefonica.net> wrote

> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 23:14:59 +0200, "Marc Battyani"
> <Marc.B...@fractalconcept.com> wrote:
>
> Does it always output pdf?

Yes, but you can write another backend if you want.
What other output do you want to produce ?

Marc

Kenny Tilton

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Oct 21, 2003, 6:22:50 AM10/21/03

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Marc Battyani wrote:

Do I recall something about "Display PDF" in OS X?

--
http://tilton-technology.com
What?! You are a newbie and you haven't answered my:
http://alu.cliki.net/The%20Road%20to%20Lisp%20Survey

frr

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Oct 21, 2003, 10:55:20 AM10/21/03

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On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 11:49:14 +0200, "Marc Battyani"
<Marc.B...@fractalconcept.com> wrote:

>
>"frr" <frr...@telefonica.net> wrote
>> On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 23:14:59 +0200, "Marc Battyani"
>> <Marc.B...@fractalconcept.com> wrote:
>>
>> Does it always output pdf?
>
>Yes, but you can write another backend if you want.
>What other output do you want to produce ?

Something easyly editable, such rtf or MS Word, preferably the former.

Hartmann Schaffer

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Oct 21, 2003, 10:21:34 PM10/21/03

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In article <bn2vdl$2...@library1.airnews.net>,
"Marc Battyani" <Marc.B...@fractalconcept.com> writes:
> ...

> The TeX font is embedded in the pdf file, it seems that ghostscript does not
> like what it find inside.

ghostscript seems to have some problems with pdf. i've had quite a
few cases where gv choked on files that xpdf and acroread handled
without problems (i never got around to investigate)

hs

--

ceterum censeo SCO esse delendam

Ralph Richard Cook

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Oct 22, 2003, 11:14:32 PM10/22/03

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SVG would be handy, and would probably reuse most of the concepts from
cl-pdf.