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.
