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# LASi Documentation

## Purpose

LASi is Copyright (C) 2003, 2004, 2006 by Larry Siden.

LASi is hosted on http://www.unifont.org

LASi provides a C++ output stream interface for writing Postscript documents containing any of the world's scripts supported by Unicode 4.0 and by Pango. Right-to-left scripts like Hebrew and Arabic are accomodated as easily as left-to-right scripts. Complex text layout (CTL) scripts such as Devanagari, Thai, Lao and Tibetan are supported to the extent provided by Pango and by the OpenType fonts installed on your system.

Postscript's show operator and font dictionaries can only provide glyphs for up to 255 code points and thus are hopelessly inadequate for many of the world's scripts, much less any kind of multilingual or scientific text encoded in Unicode.

LASi works around the limitations of Postscript's built-in font technology by generating a Postscript routine for each glyph in a string. A LASi user writes a Postscript program much as he or she may have done in the past, but now uses LASi's show() method instead of the Postscript show operator. The user simply passes UTF-8 text strings directly to LASi's show() method.

To draw the text string, LASi generates a sequence of calls to LASi-generated Postscript glyph routines. Glyph routines are only generated for glyphs that are actually used in the text. In this respect, LASi is efficient even for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK).

In addition to being efficient, the Postscript code and routines created by LASi are intelligible to human readers which facilitates debugging of Postscript programs.

## Usage

Please view the examples provided in the examples directory to see how LASi is used. The only header your program need include is LASi.h. View the examples' Makefiles to see how a program may link with libLASi.