Boxes
boxes is a pretty-printing library for laying out text in two dimensions. It is a direct port of the Haskell library boxes by Brent Yorgey.
boxes' core data type is the Box, which has a width, a
height and some contents. A box's contents can be text or other boxes.
There are functions for creating boxes from text and for combining boxes
into bigger boxes.
The text function can be used to create a box from a
string, which will have height 1 and length N, where N is the length of
the string (Nx1). char creates a 1x1 box containing a
single character. emptyBox creates an empty box of
arbitrary width and height.
para :: Alignment -> Int -> String -> Box
creates a box from a string with a specific width. The box will be as
high as necessary to fit the text, which is layed out according to the
given alignment.
The <> and <+> operators
combine boxes horizontally with and without a column of space between
both boxes, respectively. The // and /+/
operators are similar, but combine boxes vertically instead of
horizontally. hcat and vcat are versions of
<> and // that combine whole lists of
boxes instead of two at a time. hsep and vsep
are versions of <+> and /+/ that operate
on lists, with a configurable amount of space between each two boxes.
punctuateH and punctuateV also combine lists
of boxes horizontally and vertically, but allow us to specify another
box which is copied in between each two boxes.
The align, alignVert and
alignHoriz functions can be used to create new boxes which
contain other boxes in some alignment. moveUp,
moveLeft, moveDown and moveRight
move boxes by some amount inside larger boxes.
table creates a table from a list of rows and a list of
widths for each column.
The render function renders a box to a string. The
printBox function prints a box to stdout.