[Haskell-cafe] ANN: diagrams 0.4

[Brent Yorgey]

I am pleased to announce the release of version 0.4 of diagrams, a
full-featured framework and embedded domain-specific language for
declarative drawing.

The last announcement was of the 0.1 release; there have been quite a
few changes and improvements since then, including:

-   A new website including a gallery of examples:

      http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/gallery.html

-   A new comprehensive user manual with lots of illustrative
    examples:

      http://projects.haskell.org/manual/diagrams-manual.html

-   New primitive shapes: rounded rectangles, wedges, and a new
    flexible API for generating polygons

-   Cubic splines

-   Basic text support

-   Support for external image primitives

-   Lots more convenient combinators, bug fixes, and improvements

Cool, how can I try it out?
---------------------------

For the truly impatient:

    cabal install gtk2hs-buildtools
    cabal install diagrams

For the slightly less impatient, read the quick tutorial, which has
detailed information about how to install the necessary packages and
will introduce you to the fundamentals of the framework:

  http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/tutorial/DiagramsTutorial.html  

For those who are even less impatient but want to really dig in and
use the power features, read the user manual:

  http://projects.haskell.org/manual/diagrams-manual.html  

Cool, how can I contribute?
---------------------------

There are lots of ways you can contribute! First, you may want to
subscribe to the project mailing list
(http://groups.google.com/group/diagrams-discuss), and/or come hang
out in the #diagrams IRC channel on freenode.org.

-   There are lots of easy bug fixes, improvements, and feature requests
    just waiting for people wanting to get involved: see the bug
    tracker for a list of open tickets:

      http://code.google.com/p/diagrams/issues/list  

-   The source repositories are mirrored using both darcs (on
    patch-tag.com) and git (on github.com), and patches are accepted
    in either place, thanks to Owen Stephen's great work on
    darcs-bridge [1].

-   Create a higher-level module built on top of the diagrams framework
    (e.g. tree or graph layout, generating Turing machine
    configuration diagrams, Penrose tilings ... your imagination is
    the only limit!)  and submit it for inclusion in a special
    diagrams-contrib package which will be created for such
    higher-level user-contributed modules.

-   Use diagrams to create some cool graphics and submit them for
    inclusion in the gallery.

-   Start your own project built on top of diagrams and let us know how
    it goes!

-   Last but certainly not least, just try it out for your pet graphics
    generation needs and contribute your bug reports and feature
    requests.


Happy diagramming!


Brought to you by the diagrams team:

-   Brent Yorgey
-   Ryan Yates

with contributions from:

-   Sam Griffin
-   Claude Heiland-Allen
-   John Lato
-   Vilhelm Sjöberg
-   Luite Stegeman
-   Kanchalai Suveepattananont
-   Scott Walck


[1] http://wiki.darcs.net/DarcsBridgeUsage