The home of LPU -- the Label Printing Utility

LPU? What's that?

LPU (the Label Printing Utility) is a tool for creating labels and forms of any kind from a textual description.
It uses a line oriented command language to describe the desired objects. Some of the features of the language are: variables, expressions, assignments, procedures, control elements for repeated or conditional execution of statements, import of data from a textual database, and even a small debugger.
To achieve a maximum of flexibility, LPU uses Adobe PostScript(TM) as output format.

You can now read the documentation of LPU online :-)

How to install

To install LPU, proceed as follows:

uncompress and untar the supplied distribution file under a directory of your choice. This will create a subdirectory 'lpu-VERSION', where VERSION will be replaced by the actual version of LPU.
change to subdirectory 'src' of the LPU distribution
in 'Makefile', set the value of symbol 'BINDIR' to an appropriate location. The selected directory should be in the PATH of the user.
make
this should compile without errors or warnings
make install
this will copy the image 'lpu' to the desired location. Possibly, you need root permission to perform this step

After that, you should have a look at the examples in subdirectory 'demo', the file lpudoc.txt in subdirectory 'doc/de' or 'doc/en', and the README files in these directories.

If you want to create your own examples outside of the subdirectory 'demo', you should create a directory $HOME/.lpu, and copy the files lpu.dev, lpu.tab, and possibly lpu.par into that directory.

What about documentation?

The file doc/LANG/lpudoc.txt (where LANG is de for German and en for English) contains a detailed description of the features of LPU, and a reference of all commands and functions of its programming language. The same directory also contains a html version and a printable version in postscript.

Download

The following versions are available for download here:

version date name state comment

0.9-24 23.02.2003 lpu-0.9-24.tar.gz beta first version with documentation in english

0.9-26 23.02.2003 lpu-0.9-26.tar.gz beta

0.9-28 23.02.2003 lpu-0.9-28.tar.gz beta

0.9-28a 23.02.2003 lpu-0.9-28a.tar.gz beta solved problems with the new error handling functions

version	date	name	state	comment
0.9-24	23.02.2003	lpu-0.9-24.tar.gz	beta	first version with documentation in english
0.9-26	23.02.2003	lpu-0.9-26.tar.gz	beta
0.9-28	23.02.2003	lpu-0.9-28.tar.gz	beta
0.9-28a	23.02.2003	lpu-0.9-28a.tar.gz	beta	solved problems with the new error handling functions

Examples

To get a first impression of what LPU programms look like, here are some simple examples:

name date file comment

allforms 23.02.2003 allforms.lpu

example 23.02.2003 example.lpu

expr 23.02.2003 expr.lpu

fonts 23.02.2003 fonts.lpu

name	date	file
allforms	23.02.2003	allforms.lpu
example	23.02.2003	example.lpu
expr	23.02.2003	expr.lpu
fonts	23.02.2003	fonts.lpu

The examples on this page - and many more - are contained in the subdirectory demo of the LPU distribution.

As time permits, more (and more complicated ;-) examples will be included here.

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created: jrs, 08.02.1998 -- modified: jrs, 08.02.2003