ANNOUNCE: erlguten

[Joe Armstrong]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Marc Ernst Eddy van Woerkom wrote:

> >   ErlGuten is now available at 
> >
> >	   http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlguten-2.0/erlguten.html
> >
> >   ErlGuten aims to produce typographic quality PDF from XML or
> >   a Erlang program.
> >   (..)
> >   Comments, errors and all feedback is welcome, as are volunteers
> 
> My eye hung on di-fferent.
> 
> I interpret 
> 
>   http://www.xs4all.nl/~talo/talo/e_rules.html
> 
> that diff counts as one sylable and should be hyphenated after
> the consonant (the "ff").
> 

  I've just  use'd the TeX  hyphenation tables and the  algorithm from
Tex re-implement in Erlang.

> 
> > Viewers - I'd like to connect ErlGuten to the freetype project 
> > and make a GUI with the same interface as provided by the pdf module
> 
> I don't understand this.
> Do you mean writing an Erlang version of a PDF reader or something
> different?

  Yes - I'd like  a PDF reader in Erlang - and  I'd like to write GUIs
with the *same* layout language as  used for creating PDF (like go 'ol
display postscript)
> 
> 
> In General I would like to know more about the project.
> If you want to clone or surpass TeX or just have a reasonable 
> layout enginge. If you will take ideas from METAPOST etc.
> 

I want the layout language to be XML
The programming extension language to be Erlang
The fonts to be Postscript Type 1
The output to be PDF

I aim (of course) at better quality than TeX - whether I can do this
remains to be seen.

I have been reading books on Typography and there are a lot of neat
ideas around that seem never to have been implemented, like for example:

Hermann Zapfs optimization which is:

  Add an extra blank  at the start (end) of a line  - kern against the
blank and throw away the extra  blank - this is said to produce better
optical alignment of the margins.

  Also do  what Gutenberg did in the  42 line bible -  move right hand
punctuation slightly into the margin -  this is only node in PDFTeX as
far as I know (and with pleasing results)

  I also want  to bring some common sense  typography into documents -
please don't set wide A4 columns in 11/11 TimesRoman :-)


/Joe

> Regards,
> Marc
>