Announce: Pan release 2000-12-06

[Conal Elliott]

There is a new release of Pan, a Haskell-embedded language and compiler
for image synthesis, at

   http://research.microsoft.com/~conal/Pan 

I've also updated the Pan gallery with many new images for your enjoyment.

The main features of this release, relative to 2000-10-04 are

  + Anti-aliasing for much smoother-looking images!
  + Render larger than the view. 
  + ActiveX control for web pages or PowerPoint.
  + A recently given interactive presentation.

Enjoy.  - Conal

---- General description ---

Pan is an experimental embedded language and compiler for image
synthesis and manipulation, based on functional programming.  You can
get the compiler and do some Haskell programming do make your own
effects, or get some of the precompiled effects and twiddle parameters
to your heart's content.  It's fun!

The Pan compiler turns descriptions of images and image effects into
efficient machine code for use with the Pan viewer program, web-page
embedding (viewable with Internet Explorer 5.5 or later), or as a
PhotoShop plug-in.  All have automatically generated GUIs for control
of the image synthesis/manipulation parameters with real-time
redisplay.  In the Pan viewer case the parameter settings may be saved
into a small file for use later or sharing with others.

See the Pan home page at http://research.microsoft.com/~conal/Pan,
where you'll find a gallery of sample images and animations, papers on
the language and implementation, instructions for use, and the binary
and source releases.

For now, Pan-generated effects run only on Windows.  We welcome help in
porting to other platforms.  Also, the compiler assumes you have the
Microsoft Visual C++, though we think it wouldn't be very hard to support
other compilers and again we welcome help.

Please let us know what you do with Pan, both trouble you run into and
examples you construct with it (conal@microsoft.com).