Paper.js - The Swiss Army Knife of Vector Graphics Scripting

If you want to work with Paper.js, simply download the latest "stable" version from http://paperjs.org/download/

• Website: http://paperjs.org/
• Discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/paperjs
• Mainline source code: https://github.com/paperjs/paper.js
• Twitter: @paperjs
• Daily development builds: http://paperjs.org/downloads/

Development

Get the source (for building):

Git 1.6.5 and later:

git clone --recursive git://github.com/paperjs/paper.js.git

Git 1.6.4 and earlier:

git clone git://github.com/paperjs/paper.js.git
cd paper.js
git submodule update --init

Get the source (for contributing):

If you want to contribute to the project you will have to make a fork. Then do this:

git clone --recursive [email protected]:yourusername/paper.js.git
git remote add upstream git://github.com/paperjs/paper.js.git

Refreshing Your Clone

To fetch changes from origin, run

git fetch origin

If you are working with a fork and would like to fetch from upstream, run

git fetch upstream

To update the jsdoc-toolkit submodule inside the build folder, used to generate the documentation, run

git submodule update --init

Building the Library

The Paper.js sources are distributed across many separate files, organised in subfolders inside the src folder. To compile them all into one distributable file, yo need to run the build.sh script inside the build folder:

cd build
./build.sh

You will then find the built library inside the dist folder, named paper.js.

build.sh offer a row of modes:

commented		Preprocessed but still formated and commented
stripped		Formated but without comments (default)
compressed		Uses UglifyJS to reduce file size

In order to build a compressed version of Paper.js, UglifyJS version 1 needs to be installed:

npm install uglify-js@1

Building the Documentation

Similarly to building the library, you can run docs.sh inside the build folder to build the documentation.

cd build
./build.sh

Your docs will then be located at dist/docs.

Editing and Running Code during Development

As a handy alternative to building the library after each change to try it out in your scripts, there is a helper script src/load.js that loads the library directly from all the separate source files in the src folder. The shell script load.sh in the build folder produces a paper.js library in dist that does nothing else than loading the source files through src/load.js. This means you can switch between loading from sources and loading a built library simply by running build.sh or load.sh inside the build folder.

cd build
./load.sh

And to go back to a built library

cd build
./build.sh

Note that your PaperScripts examples do not need to change, they can simply load dist/paper.js, which will always do the right rhing.

Testing

Paper.js was developed and tested from day 1 using proper unit testing through jQuery's Qunit. To run the tests after any change to the library's source, simply open index.html inside the test folder in your web browser. There should be a green bar at the top, meaning all tests have passed. If the bar is red, some tests have not passed. These will be highlighted and become visible when scrolling down.

Contributing

The main Paper.js source tree is hosted on git (a popular DVCS), thus you should create a fork of the repository in which you perform development. See http://help.github.com/forking/.

We prefer that you send a pull request here on GitHub which will then be merged into the official main line repository. You need to sign the Paper.js CLA to be able to contribute (see below).

Also, in your first contribution, add yourself to the end of AUTHORS.md (which of course is optional).

Creating and Submitting a Patch

As mentioned earlier in this article, we prefer that you send a pull request on GitHub.

1. Create a fork of the upstream repository by visiting https://github.com/paperjs/paper.js/fork. If you feel insecure, here's a great guide: http://help.github.com/forking/

2. Clone of your repository: git clone https://[email protected]/yourusername/paper.js.git

3. This is important: Create a so-called topic branch: git checkout -tb name-of-my-patch where "name-of-my-patch" is a short but descriptive name of the patch you're about to create. Don't worry about the perfect name though -- you can change this name at any time later on.

4. Hack! Make your changes, additions, etc and commit them.

5. Send a pull request to the upstream repository's owner by visiting your repository's site at github (i.e. https://github.com/yourusername/paper.js) and press the "Pull Request" button. Here's a good guide on pull requests: http://help.github.com/pull-requests/

Use one topic branch per feature -- don't mix different kinds of patches in the same branch. Instead, merge them all together into your master branch (or develop everything in your master and then cherry-pick-and-merge into the different topic branches). Git provides for an extremely flexible workflow, which in many ways causes more confusion than it helps you when new to collaborative software development. The guides provided by GitHub at http://help.github.com/ are a really good starting point and reference. If you are fixing a ticket, a convenient way to name the branch is to use the URL slug from the bug tracker, like this: git checkout -tb 53-feature-manually-select-language.

Contributor License Agreement

Before we can accept any contributions to Paper.js, you need to sign this CLA:

Contributor License Agreement

The purpose of this agreement is to clearly define the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to Paper.js and thereby allow us to defend the project should there be a legal dispute regarding the software at some future time.

For a list of contributors, please see AUTHORS

License

See the file LICENSE