Provided by: netpbm_11.01.00-2build1_amd64 bug

NAME

       pbmtext - render text into a PBM image

SYNOPSIS

       pbmtext  [-wchar]  [-font  fontfile]  [-builtin fontname] [-space pixels] [-lspace pixels]
       [-nomargins] [-width pixels] [-load-entire-font] [-verbose] [-dry-run] [-text-dump] [text]

       Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable.  You may use double  hyphens  instead
       of  single  hyphen to denote options.  You may use white space in place of the equals sign
       to separate an option name from its value.

DESCRIPTION

       This program is part of Netpbm(1).

       pbmtext takes the specified text, either a single line from the command line  or  multiple
       lines from standard input, and renders it into a PBM graphical image.

       The  text  rendered  is  all  the  non-option command line arguments, separated by spaces,
       except that if there are no non-option command line arguments, it is Standard Input.

       In the image, each line of input is a line of output.  Lines are
         delimited by newline characters.

       The program renders any character in an input line that is not in the font
         as a space.  Note that control characters usually aren't in the font, but
         some fonts have glyphs for them.  The newline characters that delimit lines
         in of Standard Input are not in any line.

       Tab characters are rendered as a number of spaces; any entry in the font
         for the tab code point is irrelevant.  The number of spaces is such as to
         create tab stops every 8 characters.  Note that this is not useful if the
         font is proportional.

       The image is just wide enough for the longest line of text, plus margins,  and  just  high
       enough to contain the lines of text, plus margins.

       The  left  and  right margins are twice the width of the widest character in the font; the
       top and bottom margins are the height of the tallest character in the font.   But  if  the
       text  is  only  one  line,  all  the margins are half of this.  You can use the -nomargins
       option to eliminate the margins.

       pbmtext renders left to right.  It cannot render vertically or right to left.

       pbmtextps does the same thing as pbmtext, but uses Ghostscript to generate the characters,
       which  means you can use Postscript fonts.  But it also means you have to have Ghostscript
       installed and it isn't as fast.  Also, pbmtextps generates only one line of text,  whereas
       pbmtext can create multiple lines.

       pbmtext  is meant for simple text.  If you're working with a document, you would be better
       off using a document formatting program to "print" to a Postscript file, then feeding that
       Postscript to pstopnm.

OPTIONS

       In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet,
       see
        Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ ), pbmtext  recognizes  the  following  command
       line options:

       -wchar

              By  default,  pbmtext  takes  a  single-byte  character  stream as input.  When you
              specify -wchar, it treats input  text  as  a  multibyte  character  stream  encoded
              according  to  the current locale.  Normally, the user would supply a BDF font file
              encoded in ISO-10646-1 with a -font option.

              With -wchar, you cannot supply the text on the command line; it must  be  fed  from
              standard input.

              This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).

       -font

       -builtin
              -builtin selects a font among those built into Netpbm.

              -font  selects  a  font  that  you supply yourself either as an X Window System BDF
              (Bitmap Distribution Format) ⟨http://xfree86.org/current/bdf.pdf⟩  file or as a PBM
              file in a special form.

              The default is the built in font "bdf."

              "bdf"  is  Times-Roman  15  pixels high.  (That's about 14 point type printed at 75
              dpi).

              "fixed" is a built in fixed width font.

              For information about other fonts, and how to make  one  of  your  own,  see  Fonts
              ⟨#fonts⟩  below.

       -space pixels
               Add  pixels  pixels  of space between characters.  This is in addition to whatever
              space surrounding characters is built into the font, which  is  usually  enough  to
              produce a reasonable string of text.

              pixels  may be fractional, in which case the number of pixels added varies so as to
              achieve the specified average.  For example -space=1.5 causes half the spaces to be
              1 pixel and half to be 2 pixels.

              pixels  may  be  negative  to  crowd text together, but the author has not put much
              thought or testing into how this works in every possible case, so  it  might  cause
              disastrous results.

       -lspace pixels
               Add  pixels  pixels of space between lines.  This is in addition to whatever space
              above and below characters is built into the  font,  which  is  usually  enough  to
              produce a reasonable line spacing.

              pixels must be a whole number.

              pixels  may  be  negative  to crowd lines together, but the author has not put much
              thought or testing into how this works in every possible case, so  it  might  cause
              disastrous results.

       -nomargins
              By  default,  pbmtext  adds  margins all around the image as described above.  This
              option causes pbmtext not to add any margins.

              Note that there may still be space beyond the edges of the type because a character
              itself may include space at its edges.  To eliminate all surrounding background, so
              the type touches all four edges of the image, use pnmcrop.

       -width pixels
              This specifies how much horizontal space the text is supposed to fit into.

              If the input is one line, pbmtext breaks it into multiple lines as  needed  to  fit
              the  specified  width.  It breaks it between characters, but does not pay attention
              to white space; it may break in the middle of a word and a line may  begin  or  end
              with white space.

              If  the input is multiple lines, pbmtext assumes you already have line breaks where
              they make sense, and pbmtext simply truncates  each  line  as  needed  to  fit  the
              specified width.

       -load-entire-font

              When you use a BDF font, pbmtext will normally load from the font
                  only the characters needed for your text, not wasting time loading other
                  characters.  With this option, pbmtext will instead read the entire
                  font.  It won't make any difference in the rendered output, but it lets
                  you check the integrity of the font file.

              This option was new in Netpbm 10.91 (June 2020).  Before that, pbmtext always reads
              the entire font.

       -verbose
              This makes pbmtext issue informtional messages about its processing.

       -dry-run

              With this option, instead of outputting an image of the text, pbmtext  just  writes
              to  Standard  Output  a  message  telling the dimensions of the image it would have
              produced.

              You can specify only one of -dry-run and -text-dump.

              This option was new in Netpbm 10.75 (June 2016).

       -text-dump
              This option causes pbmtext just to write to Standard Output the text in ASCII  that
              would  be rendered.  The output reflects any text formatting, unprintable character
              substitution, tab expansion, etc.  It is for diagnosing problems.  This option  was
              new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).

              When  -wchar is in effect, the output text will be in the encoding specified by the
              current locale.

              You can specify only one of -dry-run and -text-dump.

              This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).

USAGE

       Often, you want to place text over another image.  One way to do this  is  with  ppmlabel.
       For  more  flexible (but complex) drawing of text on an image, there is ppmdraw.  These do
       not give you the font options that pbmtext does, though.

       Another way is to use pbmtext to create an image containing the text, then use pamcomp  to
       overlay  the  text  image onto your base image.  To make only the text (and not the entire
       rectangle containing it) cover the base image, you will need to give pamcomp a  mask,  via
       its  -alpha  option.   You  can just use the text image itself as the mask, as long as you
       also specify the -invert option to pamcomp.

       If you want to overlay colored text instead of black, just use  ppmchange  to  change  all
       black  pixels to the color of your choice before overlaying the text image.  But still use
       the original black and white image for the transparency mask.

       If you want the text at an angle, use pnmrotate on the text image (and transparency  mask)
       before overlaying.

FONTS

       There are three kinds of fonts you an use with pbmtext:

       •      built in

       •      BDF

       •      PBM

   Built In Fonts
       There  are  two  built  in  fonts:  bdf and fixed.  You select these fonts with a -builtin
       option.

       bdf is the default when you specify no font information on the command line.   The  naming
       reflects  the fact that it shares many characteristics of BDF style fonts.  When this font
       was implemented, pbmtext did not have the ability to read arbitrary BDF fonts specified by
       the -font option.  There is no external font file involved.

       bdf  is encoded in ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1, 8-bit).  In addition to English it can handle most
       West European languages (Spanish, French, German, Swedish ...)  This set  lacks  the  Euro
       currency sign.

       fixed is ASCII (7-bit) only.

       While  it  is  not  an  error  to  do so, you should not use the above built-in fonts with
       -wchar.

   BDF Font
       BDF is an ancient font format that at one time was standard for the X Window System.  Now,
       you  don't  see  it  very  often,  but  you  can  find  some  BDF  fonts  on  the  Xfree86
       ⟨http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/xc/fonts/bdf/⟩  web site.

       You can get the full package of the BDF fonts from XFree86 (see above) from the Netpbm web
       site ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩ .

   PBM Font
       To create a font as a PBM file (to use with the -font option), you just create a PBM image
       of the text matrix below.

       The first step is to display text matrix below on the screen, e.g. in an X11 window.

           M ",/^_[`jpqy| M

           /  !"#$%&'()*+ /
           < ,-./01234567 <
           > 89:;<=>?@ABC >
           @ DEFGHIJKLMNO @
           _ PQRSTUVWXYZ[ _
           { \]^_`abcdefg {
           } hijklmnopqrs }
           ~ tuvwxyz{|}~  ~

           M ",/^_[`jpqy| M

       Make sure it's a fixed width font -- This should display as a perfect rectangle.

       Also, try to use a simple display program.  Pbmtext divides this into a matrix  of  cells,
       all the same size, each containing one character, so it is important that whatever you use
       to display it display with uniform horizontal and vertical spacing.  Fancy word processing
       programs  sometimes  stretch  characters in both directions to fit certain dimensions, and
       that won't work.  Sometimes a display program scales a font to show a character larger  or
       smaller than its natural size.  That too won't often work because the rounding involved in
       such scaling causes non-uniform distances between characters.

       If you display the text matrix improperly, the usual symptom is that when you try  to  use
       the  font, pbmtext fails with an error message telling you that the number of lines in the
       font isn't divisible by 11, or it can't find the blank band around  the  inner  rectangle.
       Sometimes the symptom is that one of the characters displays with a piece of the character
       that is next to it in the matrix.  For example, "l" might display with a little  piece  of
       the "m" attached on its right.

       Do  a  screen  grab  or  window  dump  of  that  text, using for instance xwd, xgrabsc, or
       screendump.  Convert the result into a pbm file.   If  necessary,  use  pamcut  to  remove
       anything  you  grabbed  in  addition  to  the  text pictured above (or be a wimp and use a
       graphical editor such as Gimp).  Finally, run it through pnmcrop to make  sure  the  edges
       are right up against the text.  pbmtext can figure out the sizes and spacings from that.

       There are some historical computer fonts, such as that used by the original IBM PC, in the
       form that you can screen-grab and turn into a PBM  font  file  available  from  Stewart  C
       Russell" (1).  There are fonts with various duodecimal digit glyphs at
        treisara.deviantart.com ⟨http://treisaran.deviantart.com/gallery/38695571/NetPBM-Fonts⟩ .

       PBM fonts cannot be used with -wchar.

MULTI-BYTE INPUT

       In  the past, English text was encoded in 7-bit ASCII.  8-bit and multibyte encodings were
       needed only for non-English languages.  This is not the case today.  As of  this  writing,
       90%  of all web pages are encoded in UTF-8.  While many of them are actually restricted to
       7-bit ASCII, which is a subset of UTF-8, English text encoded in  UTF-8  commonly  employs
       "66 99" style quotation marks, which do not appear in ASCII.

       If  your  input  text  is  UTF-8, you should use -wchar.  You may have to tweak the locale
       setting.  pbmtext recognizes code points up to 65535.  This is  sufficient  for  the  vast
       majority of text written in modern languages.

       In  the  default  single-byte  (or  "narrow") character mode, pbmtext can handle 7-bit and
       8-bit character sets.  Examples are ASCII, ISO 8859 family, koi8-r/u and VISCII.  It is up
       to  the  user  to supply a BDF file covering the necessary glyphs with the "-font" option.
       The font file must be in the right encoding.

       pbmtext does not inspect the encoding of the font file.

LIMITATIONS

       If the text is from Standard Input, no line may be longer than 4999  characters.   If  one
       is, the program aborts with an appropriate error message.

       If  the  text  is  from  Standard  Input  and  contains  a null character, the results are
       abnormal.  Lines may be truncated, and a single line may  be  considered  multiple  lines.
       Normal text does not contain null characters, so this isn't a big problem.

TIPS

       If  you  get  garbled  output, check the input text encoding and font file encoding.  When
       using -wchar, also check the current locale.

       To convert the encoding of a text file, use iconv or luit.

       To check the encoding of a BDF file, examine the CHARSET_REGISTRY line and the next  line,
       which should be CHARSET_ENCODING:

           $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-a.bdf
           CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO8859"
           CHARSET_ENCODING "1"

           $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-b.bdf
           CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO10646"
           CHARSET_ENCODING "1"

       The  latter  is Unicode.  BDF files coded in ISO 16046-1 usually work for Western European
       languages,  because  ISO  16046-1  expands  ISO  8859-1  (also  called  "Latin-1")   while
       maintaining the first 256 code points.  ISO 8859-1 itself is a superset of ASCII.  Run the
       above command and verify the necessary  glyphs are present.

       IMPORTANT: For input text, a different rule applies.  If  you  feed  ISO  8859-1  text  to
       pbmtext  -wchar  set  up  for UTF-8, the output will be garbled.  Unicode provides several
       encoding schemes and different ones are in effect for input text and font.  The difference
       between  Unicode  codepoint  and  the  various  encodings is a formidable stumbling block;
       beware of web pages that get the concept wrong.

       75%  of  the  BDF  files  in  the  font  collection  available  from  the  Netpbm  website
       ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩  are in ISO 10646-1.  Many have the Euro sign,
       Greek letters, etc., but they are placed at code points available  to  pbmtext  only  with
       -wchar.

       Before  pbmtext  had  the  -wchar  option, one often had to produce a BDF file in an 8-bit
       encoding from a master BDF file encoded in ISO 10646-1.

       There are several programs that perform BDF encoding conversion.  If you have the X Window
       System  installed, first look for ucs2any.  If you don't, you can download ucs2any.pl from
       Unicode fonts and tools for X11" (1).  This website has much useful information on fonts.

       Another converter is trbdf,  included  in  the  "trscripts"  package,  available  in  some
       GNU/Linux distributions.

       BDF  files  encoded  in  ISO  8859-2, ISO 8859-7, koi8-r, etc. are available from ISO 8859
       Alphabet Soup" (1) and its sister  page  The  Cyrillic  Charset  Soup"  (1).   Though  the
       information is dated, these pages give a good overview of 8-bit character sets.

       To convert OTF or TTF font files to BDF, use
        otf2bdf by Mike Leisher ⟨http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/Software/otf2bdf⟩ .

SEE ALSO

       pbmtextps(1),  pamcut(1), pnmcrop(1), pamcomp(1), ppmchange(1), pnmrotate(1), ppmlabel(1),
       ppmdraw(1),    pstopnm(1),    pbm(1),     Pango     http://www.pango.org     ,     Cairo
       http://cairographics.org

AUTHOR

       Copyright (C) 1993 by Jef Poskanzer and George Phillips

DOCUMENT SOURCE

       This  manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source.  The master
       documentation is at

              http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtext.html