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General Purpose PostScript Generating Utility

1.4 Helping the Development

If you like a2ps and if you feel like helping, there are several things you can do.

Testing

You just can't imagine how hard it is to make sure that the program that works perfectly here will work on your machine. Actually, in general the last weeks before a release are mostly dedicated to (Unix) portability issues.

So we need beta-testers! To be one is fairly simple: subscribe to the mailing-list where the betas are announced and distributed.

Translation

The interface of a2ps is under GNU gettext which means that all the messages can be translated, without having to look at the code of a2ps: you don't need to be a programmer at all. All the details are available on the a2ps translation page.

Style Sheets

Since a2ps is evolving and getting more powerful, the style sheets should be checked and improved. There are too many so that the authors work on them. Therefore if you feel your favorite language is not honored as it should be, improve the style sheet! (see section 7. Pretty Printing for details.)

Encodings

a2ps is wide open to any 8-bit encoding. If your language is not covered today by a2ps, you can easily provide the support yourself. Honestly, the trickiest part is to find correct free fonts that support your mother tongue (see section 6.2 Encoding Files, to know more).

Fonts

There are still some characters missing in Ogonkify. See \name\{http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/ogonkify/missing.html, the list of missing characters} and \name\{http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/ogonkify/, the Ogonkify home page} for details.

Documentation

If you feel something is missing or is unclear, send us your contributions.

Porting

Porting a program to special architectures (MS-DOS, OS/2 etc.), or building special packages (e.g., RPM) requires having an access to these architectures. If you feel like maintaining such a port, tell us.

Features

Well, if you feel like doing something else, go ahead! But contact us, because we have quite a big stack of things we want to do or have started to do, and synchronizing might be useful.