By Forrest Cook
May 7, 2008
Pygments is a multi-language
syntax highlighter that is written in Python and distributed under
the BSD license. The project description states:
It is a generic syntax highlighter for general use in all kinds of software such as forum systems, wikis or other applications that need to prettify source code. Highlights are:
- a wide range of common languages and markup formats is supported
- special attention is paid to details that increase highlighting quality
- support for new languages and formats are added easily; most languages use a simple regex-based lexing mechanism
- a number of output formats is available, among them HTML, RTF, LaTeX and ANSI sequences
- it is usable as a command-line tool and as a library
- ... and it highlights even Brainf*ck!
![[Pygments]](/images/ns/pygmentslogo.png)
The project
FAQ notes that
Pygments supports a long (and expandable)
collection of input languages.
It can produce output as HTML, LaTeX, RTF and ANSI sequences for
console output. The software can be run from the
pygmentize
command-line tool, or accessed from your own Python code. See the
command line reference
for details on running pygmentize.
Pygments version 0.10 was recently
announced.
Changes include the addition of 15 new language
lexers, expansion
of the Makefile lexer's capabilities, the ability to output in several
image formats, a new style and other enhancements and fixes.
Installation of Pygments was straightforward on an Ubuntu 7.04 system.
A tar.gz file was downloaded from the
Python package
site. The file was uncompressed with gunzip and extracted with tar.
Running python setup.py install as root on the setup script
installed the software and it was ready to run.
After a quick read of the
Command Line Usage document, your author was able to run
pygmentize on some Python code and produce some rather pleasing
colorized html output.
The project's demo
page has a number of examples of Pygment's output, it also allows
you to upload your own code to see how it looks after formatting.
Pygments looks to be a well designed generic tool.
It could useful for online and offline documentation, code analysis,
education and much more. This
list of projects
is already putting Pygments to use, perhaps your project could
make use of it as well.
Comments (6 posted)
System Applications
Database Software
Version 1.2.5 of pgDesigner, a GUI database interface to
PostgreSQL, has been
announced.
"
Changes:
BUG: Fixed some bugs related to the loading and saving projects.
BUG: Fixed some bugs in class CPdfWriter.
NDA: Program compiled with version 2.5.0 of Gambas."
Comments (none posted)
The May 4, 2008 edition of the Postgres Weekly News
is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Full Story (comments: none)
Mail Software
Version 8.14.3 of sendmail has been announced.
"
This version fixes some bugs:
* the MTA accessed storage after it free()d it. This was a regression
introduced in 8.14.2, but the bug only showed up on a few operating
systems.
* ruleset processing: the function cataddr() could cause the
addition of the BlankSub character between some tokens when it
should not happen and thus failures in rule matching. It seems
that none of the default rules were affected by this bug and hence
the problem did not show up for default configurations.
* the libmilter state engine did not deal correctly with milters
that requested the omission of protocol steps during the negotiation
callback."
Full Story (comments: none)
Security
Version 1.0.2 of libprngwrap is available.
"
Maybe an interesting library for people who are very serious about
security: libprngwrap (version 1.0.2) was released. Libprngwrap replaces
calls to rand(), random() and other pseudo random generators to calls
which retrieve entropy-data from /dev/urandom (or /dev/random if you
wish and don't care about your application stalling when /dev/random is
out of entropy data)."
Full Story (comments: none)
Version 1.5 of OSSEC HIDS has been announced.
"
OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System. It
performs log analysis, integrity checking, Windows registry
monitoring,
rootkit detection, real-time alerting and active response. It runs on
most operating systems, including Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOS,
Solaris and Windows.
This new release comes with numerous new features, including new LIDS
(log-based IDS) support for Solaris BSM, Asterisk, Checkpoint,
Postfix SASL, Smart Defense, Debian package and Shorewall logs."
Full Story (comments: none)
Web Site Development
Version 0.6.30 of
nginx, an
HTTP server and mail proxy server, has been announced. Changes include
several new features and bug fixes, see the
CHANGES
file for more details.
"
In March 2007 about 20% of all Russian virtual hosts were served or proxied by nginx.
According to Google Online Security Blog year ago nginx served or proxied about 4% of all Internet virtual hosts, although Netcraft showed much less percent.
According to Netcraft in March 2008 nginx served or proxied 1 million virtual hosts."
Comments (none posted)
Miscellaneous
Version 2.3.1 of Mandriva Directory Server has been published, this is
a bug fix release.
"
The Mandriva Directory Server (MDS) is a Free Software project that
features:
* user authentication and management thanks to LDAP
* an extensible, nice looking and AJAX powered PHP web interface called
MMC (Mandriva Management Console), provided with 5 modules:
* Users and groups management
* SAMBA accounts and shares management
* DNS/DHCP management
* Email delivery management
* Web proxy blacklist management
* a Python dedicated management API for LDAP, SAMBA, and SQUID (core of
the MDS and the MMC)
* a policy system, that will allow to define users right on network
ressource".
Full Story (comments: none)
Desktop Applications
Desktop Environments
GNOME Software Announcements
The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
You can find more new GNOME software releases at
gnomefiles.org.
Comments (none posted)
Version 4.0.4 of KDE has been announced.
"
The KDE Community today announced the immediate
availability of KDE 4.0.4, the fourth bugfix and maintenance release for the
latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.0.4
is the fourth monthly update to KDE 4.0."
Full Story (comments: none)
The April 20, 2008 edition of the
KDE Commit-Digest has been
announced.
The content summary says:
"
The start of the Google Summer of Code with
47 KDE projects. Initial version of a kxsldbg plugin for Quanta. Kross-based
scripting in KDevelop. Tabs return to the kdevplatform (KDevelop, etc)
interface framework. A database plugin for Kommander, with Kommander widgets
becoming accessible within Designer. Support for file attachment and sound
annotations in Okular. Work on support for JavaScript runners, and an
enhanced visual appearance for KRunner in Plasma..."
Comments (none posted)
The following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
You can find more new KDE software releases at
kde-apps.org.
Comments (none posted)
The following new Xorg software has been announced this week:
More information can be found on the
X.Org Foundation wiki.
Comments (none posted)
GUI Packages
Trolltech has
announced the release of Qt 4.4, so ars technica
looks at the new features and interviews Trolltech CTO Benoit Schillings about the new version and where Qt is headed in the future. "
Some of the most significant features added in Qt 4.4 include a multimedia abstraction layer, an HTML rendering widget based on WebKit, a new concurrency framework, and support for rendering widgets on the toolkit's drawing canvas. This is also the first Qt release to include support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile."
Comments (none posted)
Interoperability
A
Wine Release Countdown
is in progress.
"
wine-0.9.61 was released on Friday, May 2nd, 2008. Wine is now in a code freeze in preparation for the 1.0 release.
According to http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan, wine-1.0.0-rc1, due out Friday, May 9, 2008, will be the first release candidate for 1.0."
Comments (2 posted)
Version 0.9.61 of Wine
has been announced.
Changes include:
Automatic updating of the WINEPREFIX directory,
Winhelp now uses Richedit as display engine, Many RichEdit fixes,
More improvements to IME support, More quartz fixes,
Implementation for many more Gdiplus functions and
Lots of bug fixes.
Comments (none posted)
Medical Applications
LinuxMedNews
covers
a change of strategic direction for the openEHR project.
"
Thomas Beale, Chair of the openEHR Foundation Architecture Review Board (ARB) has posted a message describing some goals for the coming year. These include a vision, roadmap and strategies for the architecture and clinical modeling. Read more; for the entire email with links and descriptions."
Comments (none posted)
Music Applications
Version 1.7.0 of Rosegarden, a MIDI sequencer, is out.
"
This release focuses mostly on notation enhancements, although there
are also substantial bug fixes in other areas."
Full Story (comments: none)
Office Suites
The first OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta release is available, and the project is
looking for testers. "
The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new
'Start Centre', new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the
status bar. A closer look shows that 3.0 has a myriad of new features.
Notable Calc improvements include a new solver component; support for
spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing; and an increase to
1024 columns per sheet. Writer has an improved notes feature and
displays of multiple pages while editing. There are numerous Chart
enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress."
Full Story (comments: 1)
Languages and Tools
C
The May 5, 2008 edition of the GCC 4.3.1 Status Report
has been published.
"
GCC 4.3.1 was scheduled for 2008-05-05, but will be delayed. There
are three P1 bugs open that need resolving before 4.3.1-rc1 is
released: a restricted pointers bug (36013), the x86 direction flag
issue (36079) where we don't yet have consensus on whether we need to
have a workaround patch applied, and the ppc64 cacoshl miscompilation
(36090) where possible patches are being discussed. Ian has applied
the CERT warning fixes to 4.3 branch, so those will be in 4.3.1."
Full Story (comments: none)
Caml
The May 6, 2008 edition of the Caml Weekly News
is out with new articles about the Caml language.
Full Story (comments: none)
Perl
The April 13-27, 2008 edition of
This Fortnight on perl5-porters is out with new Perl 5 articles.
"
"Perl simply isn't broken enough. Most things work too well, hence no-one finds that they need to fix their itch, so in turn, they don't get sucked into core development generally. Maybe we need to start adding bugs, somewhat like a protection racket."
"Your program works very nicely. It would be a shame if something went wrong with it, wouldn't it? ..."
-- Nicholas Clark, on possible future revenue schemes."
Comments (none posted)
PHP
Version 5.2.6 of PHP has been
announced.
"
The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.6. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release."
Comments (none posted)
Python
Version 0.3 of Sphinx has been announced, several new capabilities have
been added and some bugs have been fixed.
"
Sphinx is a tool that makes it easy to create intelligent and beautiful
documentation for Python projects (or other documents consisting of
multiple reStructuredText source files)."
Full Story (comments: none)
The May 6, 2008 edition of the Python-URL! is online with
a new collection of Python article links.
Full Story (comments: none)
Tcl/Tk
The April 30, 2008 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new
Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Full Story (comments: none)
IDEs
Version 4.1.3 of eric, an IDE for Python and Ruby, has been announced.
"
I'd like to inform everybody about the immediate availability of eric
v4.1.3. This is a bug fix release."
Full Story (comments: none)
Version Control
Version 1.4 of the Bazaar version control system has been announced.
"
This release of Bazaar includes handy improvements to the speed of log and
status, new options for several commands, improved documentation, and better
hooks, including initial code for server-side hooks. A number of bugs have
been fixed, particularly in interoperability between different formats or
different releases of Bazaar over there network. There's been substantial
internal work in both the repository and network code to enable new features
and faster performance."
Full Story (comments: none)
Miscellaneous
Guido van Rossum has announced the availability of "rietveld," a new code
review tool based on the Google-proprietary "Mondrian" tool. "
What I'm announcing now is the next best thing: an code review tool
for use with Subversion, inspired by Mondrian and (soon to be)
released as open source. Some of the code is even directly derived
from Mondrian. Most of the code is new though, written using Django
and running on Google App Engine." The source is available from
this page.
Full Story (comments: 3)
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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