Gtk2Hs

Gtk2Hs version 0.9.10 is now available from:

http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/download/

An installer for Windows is available. A package is available for Gentoo. Packages for other platforms should become available soon (hopefully including Fedora Core, Debian, Darwin, FreeBSD and OpenBSD).

Changes since version 0.9.9:

• New bindings for the cairo vector graphics library. This provides a easy-to-use vector graphics API (using a PDF-style drawing model) with high quality output for multiple backends (screen, print and image files).
• Completion of Pango, the text layout and rendering engine of Gtk+. We now provide all functions that end users should ever need for rendering text, ranging from type-setting whole paragraphs down to breaking up attributed text into several runs. All offsets into Haskell strings are transparently translated into UTF-8 offsets used in Pango, thereby alleviating much of the grief of dealing with Unicode.
• new Gtk+ 2.8 APIs are bound
• many bugs fixed
• various minor documentation improvements
• an installer for Windows is available again
• the mozembed HTML rendering component can now be built against the FireFox libraries if the appropriate developer files are present.

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To mark the end of Paolo Martini’s project to add support for the cairo vector graphics library we are pleased to announce a special “tech preview” release of Gtk2Hs including Paolo’s contributions.

Here’s a screenshot from a demo program Paolo and others wrote to show off the combination of Haskell, cairo and Gtk+.

You can see more of his latest screenshots in his blog.

As of version 2.8, Gtk+ now depends on cairo and uses it for much of it’s drawing. It is a great advance over Gtk’s previous drawing API. The cairo website describes it thusly:

Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. Currently supported output targets include the X Window System, win32, and image buffers. Experimental backends include OpenGL (through glitz), Quartz, XCB, PostScript and PDF file output.

Cairo is designed to produce consistent output on all output media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration when available (for example, through the X Render Extension).

The cairo API provides operations similar to the drawing operators of PostScript and PDF. Operations in cairo including stroking and filling cubic Bézier splines, transforming and compositing translucent images, and antialiased text rendering. All drawing operations can be transformed by any affine transformation (scale, rotation, shear, etc.).

We encourage anyone who has Gtk+ 2.8 installed to give this Gtk2Hs release a try and to experiment with using the cairo drawing API. Bug reports and cool screenshots will be gratefully accepted.

Download: gtk2hs-0.9.9.5.tar.gz

The release includes some demos showing how to use cairo in a stand alone fashion to produce PNG image files and also demos showing how to use the cairo api for drawing in a Gtk+ GUI (both real-time and non-real-time). There is also some preliminary reference documentation available.

This release is not intended for packaging for distros. The next ordinary release will of course retain the cairo support. It is intended that the cairo package will eventually be distributed separately since it is useful in non-GUI programs too.

This project was undertaken by Paolo as part of Google’s Summer of Code programme. In our opinion his project has been a success and so we would like to recommend to Paolo’s official mentor at Google and the judges that he be counted amongst the successful SoC programme participants and awarded the full project grant.

A new release for Gtk2Hs, namely version 0.9.9 is now available. This is a bug-fix release which is meant to fix various issues in the 0.9.8 release. Note further that the next release might be 0.9.10 and not necessarily 1.0.0. I apologise for my bad numbering scheme.

The tarball is available from at Sourceforge. The md5 checksum is 3276545190248d40c683cd42f51a1b6e.

Changes since 0.9.8:

• many documentation fixes
• documentation builds with the new haddock 0.7
• fixed an intolerant parser in c2hs, the C header-file scanner
• fixed segfaults when disconnecting signal handlers
• fixed segfaults in signals that pass TextIters
• add Pixmap from Gdk (not gtk_pixmap which is deprecated)
• added ChildAttributes to all containers
• minor fixes to our Makefile

Please report any problems with this release to our emailing list.

Changes since 0.9.7:

• much greater API coverage, including the new Gtk+ 2.6 APIs
• Yampa/wxHaskell-style properties added for all widgets
• improved reference documentation, there is more of it and the docs for each module are now split into sections.
• works with GHC 6.4
• there is now an easy-to-use installer for Windows
• build process now works in 80Mb of RAM rather than 380Mb
• added functions for manipulating Pixbufs using the Haskell mutable array interface
• fixed a limitation on signal handlers on Sparc machines
• minor API changes
• minor bug fixes
• completed GPL to LGPL conversion
• internal code cleanups and improvements

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