This was an excellent week for boxes and glue.

* the textshape Text shaper is now usable and passes almost all harfbuzz tests (still working on the last ones)
* mpgo - a Go MetaPost code is now pretty much feature complete (an bug free, of course)
* hobby, a Lua frontend for mpgo works fine
* glu, a boxes and glue Lua frontend is getting more and more functionality
* boxes and glue can now render SVGs in PDF and is font aware. it uses the textshape engine to render fonts in SVG.
* Merged some pull requests for textshape and boxesandglue.

https://boxesandglue.dev

#boxesandglue #PDF #SVG #MetaPost

A small follow-up from last post on high speed PDF generation with boxes and glue at

https://news.speedata.de/2025/05/27/highspeedpdfgeneration/

#boxesandglue #highspeedpublishing

Finally created a first real world example for the boxes and glue command line interface at https://github.com/boxesandglue/boxesandglue-examples/tree/main/commandline/zugferdinvoice

Creating 1,000 EN 16931 compliant invoices in 14 seconds on an 2021 m1 MacBook Pro is not bad...

#boxesandglue #highspeedpublishing #zugferd

Next attempt for a command line interface for #boxesandglue is now available at

https://github.com/boxesandglue/cli

There are binaries for Window, Linux and macOS and some sort of documentation at https://boxesandglue.dev/cli/. Very early stage, but it shows the direction. Great thank to the hackers at https://risor.io for the great language / Go bindings.

So for Grazer Linuxtage (#glt25) I consider submitting a talk. I came up with two talk ideas so far. Which talk would you be interested in?

*Current state of digital typesetting*
a comparsion and explanation of typesetting engines like #TeX/#LuaLaTeX, #typst, #SILE, #boxesandglue, and frontends like #Quarto

*New features in CSS3*
This talk assumes you are familiar with #CSS, but you need an update for the latest #CSS3 features with a focus on typography and line-based typesetting

New blog post: creating PDF with JavaScript

https://news.speedata.de/2024/10/14/pdfwithjavascript/

#boxesandglue #pdf #javascript

Linebreak tester updated at https://linebreak.boxesandglue.dev/ and https://github.com/speedata/linebreak-web to latest boxes and glue.

#boxesandglue #knuthplass #linebreaking #typography

This is pre alpha / experimental and just for me....

I'd like to have a visual test for the line breaking algorithm of boxes and glue, so I created a little HTML / canvas fronted with Go / Web Assembly (wasm)

https://linebreak.boxesandglue.dev

and

https://github.com/speedata/linebreak-web

More bells and whistles will follow.

#boxesandglue #linebreak

Still thinking about a pure Go graphics language for boxes and glue. One option would be porting #MetaPost to Go, but this is quite a bit of work. Any other possibilities / ideas?

https://tug.org/metapost.html

#boxesandglue #metapost #golang #graphics