Graphics output from Haskell as eps

Hi all, Has anyone done much work on outputting graphics in eps format directly from Haskell? My intention is to be able to generate publication quality diagrams for inclusion in TeX/LaTeX documents, without the size or quality penalties of using bitmaps. I want to write an automatic circuit visualisation utility somewhat analogous to the AT&T GraphViz tools, but which generates circuit diagrams that look 'right' to an electronic engineer (i.e. me). The idea is that a raw netlist (effectively a directed graph) will be generated by some other code, then fed into this tool, which will then generate a reasonably understandable circuit diagram. My most immediate requirement is to generate circuit diagrams, although longer term I'll probably also want to be able to generate chip floor plan diagrams too. I'm not too bothered about higher level drawing primitives - just something that can draw lines of appropriate widths and output text would be enough. Has anyone done anything already, or should I just pull down the PDF specs from Adobe and weigh in and write a library from scratch? If I do the latter, will anyone be likely to want to use it also? TIA, Sarah PS: To all who helped (esp. Sigbjorn Finne and Simon Peyton-Jones), the in-memory SQL database I was working on did actually work very well in the end. Unfortunately, my boss has insisted on a C++ rewrite - the C++ version (using strict evaluation and STL data structures roughly modelled on the Haskell version) is (I think, I've not measured this) a little slower, and about 5 - 10 times the size. It's been extended a little beyond the Haskell version, so it is difficult to be exact about the size difference, but gut feeling is that it took about five times as much code and about three times as long to write. And that's on the basis of someone who has over 10 years experience coding C++, but very little prior exposure to Haskell beyond the occasional recreational use. I think this proves Haskell's case as far as I'm concerned - keep up the good work, folks!

Hi Sarah, if Haskell -> MetaPost -> Postscript is good for you, have a look at FMP. It's somewhat old and doesn't cover the entire MetaPost language, but works for me. Feri.

Quoting Sarah Thompson
Has anyone done much work on outputting graphics in eps format directly from Haskell? ... Has anyone done anything already, or should I just pull down the PDF specs from Adobe and weigh in and write a library from scratch? If I do the latter, will anyone be likely to want to use it also?
Although not Haskell, you might be interested in looking at Wandy Sae-Tan's and Olin Shiver's Functional PostScript, which is embeded in the Scheme shell; scsh. http://www.scsh.net/resources/fps.html HTH -d
participants (3)
-
dvanhorn@emba.uvm.edu
-
Ferenc Wagner
-
Sarah Thompson