Not without a lot of joy, I am announcing you that early this week a happy event took place and libwpg-0.1.0 official release came to be. Libwpg is a library for reading and converting WordPerfectTM Graphics (WPG) files. In can be used by converters or renderers. A convenience tool and API for generating Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) from a WPG file is included. A private statically linked version of this library is currently used by inkscape in their WPG import filter. The Novell Edition of OpenOffice.org 2.3 will also contain a WPG import filter based on this library, as well as the upcoming AbiWord 2.6 release.
As every initial release, even this baby might have some rough edges. Nevertheless, we are confident that it will bring joy to its parents and to all those who will have any use of it.
The thanks for this release go to many people. First of all to Mark "uwog" Maurer and Will Lachance, of multiple fames, for instigating this project. To Mark Oude Kotte (aka Foddex) for starting it, to Ariya Hidayat for doing almost all the work. AbiWord's Sum1 took his time tearing the library down and filing bugs against it before it even came out of its mother's womb. Thanks to him, we were able to catch and fix many bugs. Last and indeed least, the thanks go also partly to me who will take all the glory and to whom you can send your donations and thank-you contributions. We definitely should not forget Uncle Google who put some $$$ into this endeavor in the frame of Google Summer of Code in 2006.
The source packages and convenience binaries for Win32 platform can be found here. You are encouraged to download the, pet them, delight in them and maybe use them before they finish in the Wastebasket.
Enjoy and send your bug reports and feature requests to libwpg-devel mailing list (you'll have to register to do that though). And if you feel an urge to code, your patches will be most welcome at the same address.
