
Q-GGI - GGI interface for the Q programming language
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GGI, the General Graphics Interface, is a graphics library which aims to
provide a reliable, stable and fast graphics system that works everywhere. It
is a great framework for developing portable graphics applications. See
http://www.ggi-project.org/ for more information. This module provides an
interface to GGI for the Q programming language. Only the basic operations of
libggi are supported at this time; future releases will probably add the more
advanced features and extensions when these parts of GGI become stable. But
the module is already quite usable for doing raster graphics on a wide variety
of systems and output devices. Experimental support for simple alpha blending
as well as advanced text rendering via FreeType2 is now also available.

The module requires that you have libggi (version 2.0 or later) and libgii
(version 0.8 or later) installed. For the additional font support you also
need version 2 of the FreeType library (http://www.freetype.org/).

Since the GGI project at SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ggi/)
only provides source tarballs at this time, and GGI is not yet included in the
major Linux distributions, we provide some RPMs for the required libraries on
the Q homepage. NOTE: The Windows package now comes with the most recent GGI
from CVS, including Peter Ekberg's much improved DirectX driver. To make the
module work on Windows, please make sure that the GGI_CONFDIR environment
variable points to your Qpad/ggi/etc/ggi directory. (This should be taken care
of automagically when running scripts via the Qpad application.)

Please see ggi.q for a description of the functions provided by this module.
For more in-depth information about GGI please refer to the corresponding
manual pages. A few sample scripts are also provided; you can find these, once
installed, in the share/q/examples/ggi directory (Qpad/examples/ggi on
Windows).

Acknowledgements
----------------

Special thanks are due to GGI project admin Christoph Egger who spent a lot of
time helping me to sort out bugs in GGI's DirectX driver, and to Peter Ekberg
who recently took over maintenance of the driver and did an excellent job
improving it beyond the initial bare-bones implementation.


Enjoy! :)

Oct 2 2004
Albert Graef
ag@muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de, Dr.Graef@t-online.de
http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/~ag
