overview.edoc

			-*- html -*-

	NGerlGuten overview page


@title Next Generation ErlGuten - a typesetting system for producing PDF from XML

@author Joe Armstrong
@author Mikael Karlsson
@author Johan Bevemyr
@author Sean Hinde
@author Håkan Stenholm
@author Carl Wright
@copyright 2003-2012 Joe Armstrong, Mikael Karlsson, Johan Bevemyr,
Sean Hinde, Håkan Stenholm, Carl Wright
@version {@version}

@doc <img src="../doc/NextGenErlguten_logo.png" width="537" height="88"></img><br/> NGerlGuten is a typesetting system for producing PDF from XML.

NGerlGuten is free software published under the MIT license.

The word ErlGuten is built from <a href="http://www.erlang.org/">Erlang</a>
plus <a href="http://www.gutenberg.de/english/index.htm">Gutenberg</a>.

The goal of NGerlGuten is to produce <i>typographic quality</i> output - this
means that we aim at the highest quality possible for the typeset text. The
NGerlGuten text justification algorithms produce paragraph-optimized text with
fully kerned data, normally the production of such text cannot be done by
everyday word-processing programs but requires the use of dedicated
typesetting programs.

== Gallery ==

<center><img src="../doc/NGerlguten diagram 6may10.jpg" width="257" height="130"></img><br/></center>

Here you can see the inputs to NGerlGuten and the corresponding output.

<center>
<table border="1">
<tr>
<td><b>Inputs</b></td><td>Output</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="../../ng_examples-0.1.0/testing/template%20testing/test1.xml">test1.xml</a> <br/>
<a href="../../ng_examples-0.1.0/testing/template%20testing/galley_001.gal">galley_001.gal</a></td>
<td valign="top"><a href="../../ng_examples-0.1.0/testing/test1.pdf">test1.pdf</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="../../ng_examples-0.1.0/testing/eg_test1.erl">eg_test1.erl</a></td>
<td><a href="../../ng_examples-0.1.0/testing/eg_test1.pdf">eg_test1.pdf</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="../../ng_examples-0.1.0/testing/eg_test4.erl">eg_test4.erl</a></td>
<td><a href="../../ng_examples-0.1.0/testing/eg_test4.pdf">eg_test4.pdf</a></td>
</tr>

</table>
</center>


== Download ==

The transformation software is written in Erlang. To run the system you will
need to install Erlang, which is available from <a
href="http://www.erlang.org/">www.erlang.org</a>.

=== Release information ===

This is release 2.6 of NGerlGuten. 

Release 2.5 thru 2.1 were
maintained for the last few years at Klarna AB (formerly Kreditor). It is now
published under the MIT license, with permission from all the authors.
The previous release (2.1) can be found at 
[http://www.sics.se/~joe/erlguten-2.1/erlguten.html].

=== Ideas for Future releases ===

<ul> 
<li>Font embedding - so far we can only use the PDF embedded type 1
postscript fonts - I'd like to extend this to cover all type 1 postscript
fonts, together with truetype fonts.</li>
<li>A content management system for the production of digital
newspapers.</li>
<li>Plug-ins. I want to make a plug in architecture - so effects like
drop-paragraphs etc. will all be implemented through a standard plug-in
interface.</li>
<li>Viewers - I'd like to connect ErlGuten to the freetype project and make
a GUI with the same interface as provided by the <i>eg_pdf</i> module.</li>
</ul>