Genesis

History

The initial version was a shell program written by @email{evan@csli} (Evan Kirshenbaum). It was very slow and contained many bugs.

A new version was written in C by Miguel Santana for improve speed execution and portability. Many new features and improvements have been added since this first version. Many contributions (changes, fixes, ideas) were done by a2ps users in order to improve it.

From the latest known version from Miguel Santana (4.3), Emmanuel Briot implemented bold faces for keywords in ada, c and c++.

From that version, Akim Demaille generalized the pretty-printing capabilities, implemented more languages support, and quite a lot other things.

Since the very beginning of @pack{}, many people have brought help:

• Oscar Nierstrasz @email{<oscar@iam.unibe.ch}
• Tim Clark @email{T.Clark@warwick.ac.uk}
• @email{tullemans@apolloway.prl.philips.nl}
• Johan Vromans @email{jv@mh.nl}
• @email{craig.r.stevenson@att.com}
• @email{erikt@cs.umu.se}
• @email{wstahw@lso.win.tue.nl}
• @email{mai@wolfen.cc.uow.oz}
• Johan Garpendahl @email{garp@isy.liu.se}
• John Interrante @email{interran@uluru.stanford.edu}
• Chris Adamo @email{adamo@ll.mit.edu}
• Larry Barbieri @email{lbarbieri@ll.mit.edu}
• Denis Girou @email{Denis.Girou@idris.fr}
• Thomas Parmelan @email{Thomas.Parmelan@efrei.fr}
• Paul Shum @email{pshum@ali.bc.ca}.

Some people helped to the translation:

• Daniele Ghiotti (Italian)
• Tomek Burdziak (Polish)
• Miguel A. Varo @email{mvaro@dlsi.ua.es} (Maintainer for Spanish and Catalan)
• Michael Wiedmann @email{mw@miwie.in-berlin.de} (Maintainer for German)
• Christian Kirsch @email{ck@held.mind.de} (German)
• Erwin Dieterich @email{debaycrk@ibmmail.com} (German)
• Juliusz Chroboczek @email{jec@dcs.ed.ac.uk} (Polish)
• Marcel van der Laan @email{marcel@spase.nl} (Dutch)
• Lorenzo M. Catucci @email{lorenzo@argon.roma2.infn.it} (Italian)
• Choi Jun Ho @email{junker@jazz.snu.ac.kr} (Korean)
• Turgut Uyar @email{uyar@cs.itu.edu.tr} (Turkish)

Thanks

Juliusz Chroboczek worked a lot on the integration of Ogonkify's products (such as Latin 2 etc. fonts) in @pack{}. Without his help, and the time is devoted to both @pack and ogonkify, many non west-european people would still be unable to print easily texts written in their mother tongue.

Denis Girou brought a constant and valuable support through out the genesis of pretty-printing @pack{}. His comments on both the program and the documentation are the origin of many pleasant features (such as `--prologue').

A big thank must be given to Markku Rossi (the author of GNU enscript), for the advises he gave, and for portions of his code which are now used in @pack{}. Even portions of this very documentation are taken from the GNU enscript man pages.