http://laidout.org

Please post any complaints and other correspondence to the Laidout general mailing list found at: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/laidout-general

Currently the only developer (and creator of Laidout) is also a client: Tom Lechner (http://www.tomlechner.com)

Laidout is currently in the 'mostly works on my machine' stage of development.

Laidout currently can arrange pages into various impositions, such as a booklet, or even a dodecahedron. You can manipulate images and gradients (linear, radial, and mesh). Also, you can make a type of image that can be stretched around. The very basics to get my cartoon books done, in other words. Many more features are planned, like such non-essentials (to me anyway) as text! Who needs text when a picture is worth a thousand words? You can import EPS or image files from other programs as a way to fake having text.

Laidout is built upon the Laxkit (http://laxkit.sourceforge.net).

If you are compiling from development source, not from a release, please see 'Compiling from source' below.

You will need a few extra development libraries on your computer in order to compile Laidout. Running ./configure does a simple check for these, but the check is so simple, that it may miss them or otherwise get confused. You will need the header files for Imlib2, freetype2, fontconfig, cairo, x11, xft ssl, and cups.

If you are on a debian based system, you can probably install these with this command:

apt-get install g++ pkg-config libpng12-dev libreadline-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxi-dev libxft-dev libcups2-dev libimlib2-dev libfontconfig-dev libfreetype6-dev libssl-dev xutils-dev libcairo2-dev

If you want to use the optional Opengl based unwrapper, you should also do this:

apt-get install libgraphicsmagick++1-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libftgl-dev

Ensure that you have the Laxkit (http://laxkit.sourceforge.net) available. If you have downloaded a release, then the Laxkit is included.

Here are the current "./configure" options. They are all optional:

 --help                       Show the options you can pass to ./configure
 --prefix=/where/to/install   Default /usr/local
 --gs=/path/to/gs             Where is your ghostscript executable? This is quite
                               optional, and is used at the moment only to
                               generate a preview image of EPS files.
 --laxkit=/laxkit/headers     Default in releases is ./laxkit/lax, since the Laxkit
                               is currently included in release download
 --version=OtherVersionNum    You may force Laidout to compile with a different
                               version string. This will make ~/.config/laidout/(version)
                               and the executable becomes laidout-(version), and will
                               save system stuff in prefix/share/laidout-(version).
 --language=/path/to/langs    The path where translation files should be installed.
                               This will normally be prefix/share, and the files
                               themselves get put in prefix/share/locale/*.

To compile and install Laidout, just run these three easy steps:

./configure
make
make install

Note that if your computer has, say, 8 processors, you can compile much faster using make -j 8 instead of plain make.

make install will put laidout-(whatever version) in (usually) /usr/local/bin, and make a symbolic link /usr/local/bin/laidout point to it.

After successfully making, the program laidout in the src directory is the thing you want. It does not really depend on any other files currently (except icons, but they are not needed to actually run), thus it can be run from wherever it is located, but you might need to set an alternate icon directory, since Laidout will expect icons in the install destination.

You can do that or perhaps try out other icon sets (if you have any) by modifying the file ~/.config/laidout/(version)/laidoutrc. This will have been created the first time you run Laidout. Open this file, and if the magic worked, simply uncomment the line for icon_dir and set to the directory you want. For the uninstalled icons, this would be (this directory)/src/icons.

If you want to create a deb package of Laidout, make sure you have the fakeroot, dpkg-dev, and debhelper packages installed, and have all the other packages listed from the COMPILING section above, and do this from the top laidout directory:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

If the magic works, you will find installable packages in the directory directly above the Laidout directory. If it does not work, please let me know so I can fix it!

If you fail with this error: dpkg-shlibdeps: error: no dependency information found for /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 then you need to change: dh_shlibdeps in debian/rules to: dh_shlibdeps --dpkg-shlibdeps-params=--ignore-missing-info Maybe something to do with non-packaged NVidia drivers?

It is quite ok to install different versions of Laidout at the same time. The ~/.config/laidout/ directory keeps all the config information in subdirectories based on the version. The same applies for installed binaries and other resources that get put in prefix/share/laidout. This way, you do not risk clobbering or corrupting files from other versions.

You can change the version number manually by specifying it when you run ./configure with somelike:

./configure --version=0.092-different

You should try to preserve the main version number (which is 0.092 in this example), or it might confuse Laidout at some point.

HOWEVER, (todo) work needs to be done on "make uninstall" to not remove things that were installed to those directories outside of "make install". Right now, everything in prefix/share/laidout/version will be removed on uninstall (but not anything in ~/.laidout). If this is causing you difficulty, please let me know, and I'll try to finally fix this.

In any case, if you can, it's really safer to build the deb package, which automatically keeps track of such things, though with deb packages, you currently can have only one at a time, without tinkering with debian/control.

Also, though you can have different versions coexist, there is not currently an automatic way to convert resources from older laidout versions to newer ones. Again, if this is a problem, let me know!

For the Laidout development version, you will need the Laxkit development version from the same date, give or take 10 minutes or so. Be advised that the dev version may be rather buggy compared to "stable" versions!

Here is a fast and easy way to get Laidout up and running from development source:

1. Grab Laidout source from github (make sure the git package is installed): git clone https://github.com/Laidout/laidout.git

2. Grab the Laxkit submodule: Enter the laidout directory and execute this to initialize the laxkit submodule:

    cd laidout
    git submodule update --init
   

3. Compile the goods, by doing this:

    cd laxkit
    ./configure
    make depends
    cd ..
    ./configure
    make depends
    make
   

   Note that the Makefiles in git are for the development source, which also tries to do make of the Laxkit, since Laxkit and Laidout are being developed basically side by side. Just remove those parts of the Makefiles if you want to compile only Laidout.

   Also note that if your computer has, say, 8 processors, you can compile much faster using make -j 8 instead of plain make.

4. Icons. Steps 1-3 have (ideally) compiled everything. You can run Laidout (at src/laidout) without icons and also without installing it anywhere.

   When downloading development source code, the icons have not yet been generated. Making the icons requires Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) to generate icons from src/icons/icons.svg, and in laxkit/lax/icons/icons.svg. A python script there calls Inkscape. cd to src/icons and run "make". Do the same for laxkit/lax/icons/.

   The laxkit icons need to be put in the laidout icon area. do this with:

   cp laxkit/lax/icons/*png src/icons
   

   All this in one step:

   cd laxkit/lax/icons; make; cp *png ../../../src/icons; cd ../../../src/icons; make
   

   Some day, the icons will themselves be stored in a Laidout file, and Laidout itself will generate the icons (maybe!). The current system is a bit cumbersome.

   You can use src/icons/makeimages.py to regenerate all icons, or single icons if you like. The master icon file is src/icons.svg. Each top level object in that file with ids that start with a capital letter will have an icon generated of the same name by running makeimages.py ThatName.

5. Running Laidout might spit out copious amounts of debugging info to stderr if you run from a terminal. If this is the case, you can turn this off with make hidegarbage before doing make (the same goes for the Laxkit). Be advised that this requires Perl to be installed. Or, you can just run Laidout like this:

   ./laidout 2> /dev/null
   

There is a lot of source code documentation available via doxygen, just type:

make docs

or if you want all documentation for the Laxkit and Laidout in one place, then make sure you have a link to the Laxkit source in the top Laidout directory, and do:

make alldocs

This will dump it all out to docs/html. In particular, you will have a rapidly expanding todo list. If you want to contribute, that is a good place to start. That and the Laxkit todo list.

A down and dirty way to become aquainted with the source code is to download the Laxkit to the top laidout directory (if it is not there already), and change the following lines in the Doxyfile-with-laxkit to say YES rather than NO:

SOURCE_BROWSER         = YES
EXTRACT_ALL            = YES

Then from the docs directory, run doxygen Doxyfile-with-laxkit (or do make alldocs from top directory), which will generate a clickable source tree accessible from your favorite web browser.

By the way, all the code assumes tabs are 4 characters wide. (in vim, :set tabstop=4)

Also check out the dev page on the Laidout website: http://www.laidout.org/dev.html

For the adventurous, you can help make Laidout work on OS X. Straight from downloading, it will not compile all the way on OS X. You'll still need x11, xft, Imlib2, freetype2, fontconfig, ssl, and cups. I'm just guessing, since I don't have access to an OS X or other BSD based machine, but it shouldn't be too hard to make Laidout work on them. There are a few places where I use GNU-only functions, like getline(), which shouldn't be very difficult to replace or define similar functions.

Sorry, you're out of luck at the moment. If this is important to you, and you don't want to figure it out yourself, feel free to subsidize a windows port with copious amounts of money.