Status update

30 December 2011

Converted my development work from a Windows environment to Linux. Dramatically rearranged the code and directories so that the code can build with SINAN. Fixed some bugs.

12 June 2010

Added the ability to include PNG images in a PDF. PNG images give you transparency features enabling much more powerful control over the images shown in your PDF. With transparency you can overlap images to create sophisticated documents. This effort to process PNG images pushed aside the effort to restore the erlguten.erl application to working order. Logical next steps are continuing the work on erlguten.erl or adding the ability to use TrueType fonts in NGerlguten.

25 April 2010

Extracted code from tmo_doc.erl, a test program that creates a technical manual, to create eg_table.erl. This is a general table formatter that accepts a tuple or an XML string describing the table contents and then formats the minimum size table to meet your constraints. Took the useful contents of eg_pdf_assemble.erl and inserted then into eg_pdf.erl. Then I converted the pdf_loop that was used to build a PDF and replaced it with a gen_server behaviour. eg_pdf.erl has been OTPified. eg_pdf_assemble.erl was deleted.

I’ve made small improvements in the documentation. I’m resisting the urge to do lots of documentation to put the time into work making the erlguten.erl module work again. I’m also getting ready to put time into my related project, BigBill.

19 April 2010

Yet another version of erlguten has arisen, but this one is pretty good. It has better handling of font information and provides hyphenation dictionaries for English, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish and Danish. I’ve already checked all the tests; they are working. I’ve rearranged file locations a little (programmer’s prerogative). Added rotation for text as a eg_pdf.erl call. The rotate we had only worked for graphics. PDF has a separate coordinate space for text. I’ve also added a test program that creates a Comcast bill for cable data service. This uncovered a number of issues that I’ve fixed.

The erlguten.erl module still doesn’t work. I’ll be sorting that out pretty soon. I also aspire to converting most of NGerlguten to OTP modules. I converted both of the previous versions to OTP. I’ve got to decide whether I’ll fix erlguten.erl or go OTP first. Have a good day!

7 April 2010

I’ve integrated the 2003 and 2007 versions of erlguten. All of the test programs work. There are duplications of code now. I’ve got some code that works with erlguten from 2003 and other code that works with the newer code from 2007. I’ll be sorting them out and getting rid of code. For example, I’ve got two font_servers (eg_font_server and erlguten_font_server). I’m studying how fonts are stored and used. I’m looking for ways to embed new fonts into the results. I continue studying the code and documenting it. I’ll also create more example programs that produce documents.

25 March 2010

I’ve bundled up my previous work and started all over again with the newer version of erlguten. This will take a few days before I can get back to having an OTP based version of erlguten.

11 March 2010

Discovered that I started this project with an older version of erlguten from 2003. There is a 2007 version that includes work by Torbjorn Tornkvist. I’m reconciling these two versions to integrate the improvements in the more recent version. The code will go thru a period of confusion as I sort the differences out.

26 Feb 2010

The makefile no longer works. I’ve rearranged the files and directories too much. I’m in the midst of adding OTP behaviours and make erlguten into an “application”, If you want to use it before I’m done, contact me and I’ll help you.

Carl Wright