GeSHi 1.1.1 Released

11/06/2006
The next step on the road to a stable 1.2.0 release is now complete, with the release of GeSHi version 1.1.1. This version is a quantum leap forward in the accuracy and customisability of highlighting, with major new features since 1.1.0 including:

* Support for multiple output formats, e.g. PDF, ODT etc (only HTML is supported now but there's nothing stopping you adding support for other formats yourself).
* Huge memory usage reductions
* Support for "code parsers" - which allows a function to get access to the parsed source and modify it befor it is rendered, leading to insanely more complicated highlighting being possible (anyone using the new Java/C support especially will see this!)
* Support for themes for output - for example, the source could be themed like your favourite IDE. Currently there's a default theme, a theme that matches the output of PHP's highlight_file output and basic support for Borland IDE styles. I expect that many more will be added as they're really easy to write - for example vim/emacs themes, Eclipse and more.
* Language file format change, to make it much easier to write languages with minimal duplication e.g. of keyword lists. The format change makes loading languages tons faster also.

Of course, as well as all of that there's been myriads of bug fixes and overall a speed increase, as well as language support improving for most languages and new support added for Java, VHDL and C.

Now again active development will resume heading towards a 1.1.2 release. 1.1.2 will include yet more improvements to highlighting, although no new major end-user features are planned. Basically it will be a release that hopefully brings highlighting support to the level it will be at in 1.2.0.

Future releases after that will concentrate on things like caching, performance, bug fixing and the like until 1.1.5. After that the focus will move to reimplementing the old API, moving languages to the new format, writing new themes and renderers and all the other details that will make 1.2.0 just so much better than 1.0.X :). Usability will definately take an upward turn after 1.1.5 :)

And the best part is, I don't think it will take too long to go through each of the 1.1.2 - 1.1.5 releases. They're broken into similar sized blocks and I'm having a good run of time available at the moment (see the recent spate of releases). Let's hope it continues!