HGL Suite

HGL or HGL Suite is an open source, freely distributed compiler and interpreter command-line software specially designed for developing images. It features its own simple, yet powerful language.

The application's runtime input is handled entirely by plugins, including image output supporting the JPEG, PNG, GIF, caca (ASCII art), X11 (simple viewer), netpbm and decompiler, as well as control input plugins like command-line and CGI input modules. Its output format is also configurable by plugins and the app can be easily integrated into various environments, such as graphical applications and web servers.

How does it work?

For those curious about how the program works, we can tell you that the input is taken from a source file that needs to be compiled for frequent and quick access by the interpreter, which then runs the compiled files, takes input from custom plugins (if required), and outputs its result.

HGL Suite is a network transparent software, which means that it gets input from heterogeneous protocols. It's powered by LUA scripting and can be used as to quickly and easily convert the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format to HGL (HP Graphics Language) files.

Getting started with HGL Suite

To install the application on your computer, you will have to download the latest version from Softoware (the software is distributed primarily as a tar.xz archive), save it on your path, extract it and fire up a terminal emulator.

Navigate to the location of the extracted folder, execute the “./configure && make” command (without quotes). Wait for the program to be compiled and then run the “make install” command, without quotes, as root (system administrator).

Under the hood and availability

The software is written in the C++, Lua and Yacc programming languages. It’s a graphics toolkit that runs from the command-line, targeted at advanced users and developers. At the moment, the developers provide PPA repositories for the Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions, as well as their derivatives.

What is new in this release:

• This release moves the decompiler (the -d switch in the interpreter) into own output plugin, makes svg2hgl refuse svg files which contain unrecoverable invalid IDs, adds an "include" function to import HGLZ files, and makes many bugfixes.

What is new in version 0.5.17:

• This release lets the netpbm image output plugin write both PPM and PAM and increases the performance of the compiler.

What is new in version 0.5.16:

• Improved signing and signature verification.
• Fixed a bug with the -I (searchdirs) option.
• Bumped to libhgltypes2.
• A default signing key can be set in the config file.
• The ability to explicitly allow unsigned hglz files.

What is new in version 0.5.12:

• This release disables PDF documentation (it caused too many problems to create), provides background prefetching of remote fonts for the interpreter, adds overall performance improvements (especially at bezier calculations), and fixes the Ellipse fill with alpha not to produce artifacts.

What is new in version 0.5.11:

• This is mainly a maintenance release, with a further reworked code base and improved developer documentation.
• Interpreter: an unhandled exception in LUA execution has been fixed.
• libhgltypes: minor performance improvements.
• More compact documentation.
• libhgltypes: improved structural integrity checks.

What is new in version 0.5.10:

• This is mainly a developers release including updated documentation and internally reworked code.
• It added support for the SMB protocol, libhgltypes1 documentation, a restructured code base, and structural integrity checks.

What is new in version 0.5.3:

• Refined bezier curves by calculating more points.
• Fixes an issue in the z instruction in svg2hgl.
• Fixes a crash on invalid groups in svg2hgl.
• The decompiler produces smaller results (fractionless floats as integers).
• A basic SVG image output plugin has been added.
• Internal code changes and bugfixes.

What is new in version 0.4.80:

• X-axis centric gradient fill for polygons is now supported.
• Decompiling with the -d switch in the interpreter was implemented.
• bash completion was provided for the hgl interpreter.
• Text rendering now uses HGL virtual units instead of absolute pixels.
• Alpha (blending) support was improved.
• Render callback calculation was corrected.
• The progress.sh example script was improved.

What is new in version 0.4.76:

• This version is called "lightspeed release" because HGL got an enormous performance boost, especially with large projects.
• It also adds the new Lua functions createGroup and getGroup, fixes memory leaks, adds bounding box and aspect ratio calculation, and adds centric fill for ellipses.