text-align=”justify” in future xmlroff

One of the longstanding problems for xmlroff has been that Pango didn’t do justified text. Not anymore. The blog entry by Behdad Esfahbod at http://mces.blogspot.com/2007/05/justified-text-with-pango.html shows that it has been implemented, and once it’s in a Pango release, xmlroff will be able to use it.

I found that blog entry by looking for mentions of kashida support in Pango, and it looks like that could be in the works too.

xmlroff has moved

xmlroff development has moved to a Trac and Subversion at http://xmlroff.org/. The xmlroff-list mailing list has also moved. Hosting for xmlroff.org is kindly provided by Patric Stout of the ISeeR web hosting and IT service company in the Netherlands.

The new arrangement makes it easier for everybody (not just me) to update the xmlroff website, and it makes it extremely easy to link between the website, the tickets (i.e., bug reports and feature requests, etc.), and both the source code and the change logs in the Subversion repository. I am already using the Trac tickets more than I ever used SourceForge tracker items.

xmlroff on Cygwin

I have successfully compiled xmlroff using Cygwin on Windows 2000. xmlroff runs blazingly fast; the only problems are that it completely ignores its input and it doesn’t produce any output.

xmlroff on (X)ubuntu

I got xmlroff to compile and run on Xubuntu today using only the packages available from the package manager.

I need to do more to make ‘configure’ fail when popt is not installed, but otherwise is was mostly straightforward.

Pango 1.14.2 and Cairo 1.2.4

After upgrading to use recent bug-fix releases of Pango and Cairo, I’m now eyeballing and verifying the output of over 300 tests with differences, but so far the Pango and Cairo bug fixes don’t seem to have resulted in any fortuitous fixes for xmlroff bugs. At least the xmlroff testing module automates identifying the tests with differences so I don’t have to check the output of several hundred other tests.

xmlroff 0.3.99

xmlroff 0.3.99 is now available from http://xmlroff.org/. This is an development snapshot that includes a new manpage in DocBook XML and a truly experimental SVG output capability. The “testing” and “testsuite” modules are also updated.

In one sense this is snapshot of xmlroff as it was when I was told that I was RIFed (funny how everything seems to come back to that these days), but it is really more a snapshot of the changes made when I had a week off work in mid-July.