libLASi-1.1.3 has been released

libLASi is a cross-platform library originally written by Larry Siden that provides a C++ stream output interface ( with operator << ) for creating Postscript or Encapsulated PostScript documents that can contain characters from any of the scripts and symbol blocks supported in Unicode and by Owen Taylor's Pango layout engine. The library accommodates right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew as easily as left-to-right scripts. Indic and Indic-derived Complex Text Layout (CTL) scripts, such as Devanagari, Thai, Lao, and Tibetan are supported to the extent provided by Pango and by the OpenType fonts installed on your system. All of this is provided without need for any special configuration or layout calculation on the programmer's part. For more details about libLASi see http://www.unifont.org/lasi/.

Our development team (http://sourceforge.net/p/lasi/_members/) is proud to announce the release of libLASi-1.1.3 which incorporates several bug fixes for the previous (1.1.2) release. The most important of these are the following:

• Improve the libLASi response when pango/fontconfig chooses a pure bitmap font (e.g., the popular Noto Color Emoji) to render a PangoItem. Such a choice is not useful to libLASi because that library can only use outline fonts. Before this fix libLASi threw an error and aborted for this situation. Now it replaces all glyphs in the affected PangoItem with the default missing glyph which is normally an empty box. This change allows software that uses this library (e.g., the PLplot psttf device driver ) to proceed smoothly for this situation.
• Identify glyphs by their UCS4 codes rather than arbitrary sequential unique numbers. When bounding boxes were being calculated the old method generated redundant unused glyph storage (same glyph information but different sequential number) in PostScript headers. Furthermore, the numbers were different depending on the order of glyphs encountered resulting in, e.g., octave PLplot results for -dev psttfc (which depends on LibLASi) being different than C results. This fix solves both those issues.
• The static version of libLASi is now compiled with the appropriate flag(s) (e.g., -fPIC on Unix platforms) so that external shared objects (such as the PLplot psttfc device) can link to a static version of libLASi without issues.

For further details please consult the libLASi-1.1.3 file release area. That location includes release notes, a detailed ChangeLog, the source tarball, and a detached gpg signature for that tarball.

Enjoy using libLASi-1.1.3 to make some very nice looking PostScript results. Your feedback on the lasi-devel mailing list (http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lasi-devel) is welcome.

Alan W. Irwin on behalf of the libLASi developers.