Ubuntu Manpage: wml::des::gfont - Graphical Font Tag

NAME

       wml::des::gfont - Graphical Font Tag

SYNOPSIS

        #use wml::des::gfont

        <gfont [attributes]>One Single Line Of Text</gfont>

DESCRIPTION

This is a nice interface to the gFONT program which can be found at
http://www.engelschall.com/sw/gfont/. It provides a "<gfont>" tag which can be used
similar to the standard HTML tag "<font>". But instead of online rendering by the
webbrowser the text is rendered offline via gfont into a GIF image. This has the
following advantages:

All TeX-available fonts can be used.
you can use any TeX-available fonts instead of the commonly known ones the typical
browsers support. These fonts will actually look like you want, i.e. Helvetica _is_
Helvetica with "<gfont>" while it can be Arial or a totally different (substituted)
font when using the "<font>" tag.

Fonts with much greater size can be used.
With "<gfont>" you can increase the "size" attribute up to +9 which is actually 200pt
in size while the HTML font tag usually stops at +4. So "<gfont>" can be used for big
headlines.

You can create banners with colored backgrounds.
The standard "<font>" tag cannot use a different background color in HTML 3.2,
"<gfont>" can. Because it directly renders into a GIF image which background has not
to be transparent.

When an image is generated, a text file containing the command which has been run is
created, its name is the image file name with a ".cmd" suffix. When WML is re-run, this
file is searched for and gFONT executed only if command line has changed.

ATTRIBUTES

base=filename
Usually the created images for a source file page.wml are named page.gfontXXX.gif
where "XXX" is a number starting with 000. When you use a "base=foo" attribute, then
the resulting files are named foo.gfontXXX.gif. Actually you can even use a complete
filename including a directory prefix, i.e. when you use "base=../../common/foo"
attribute, then the GIF images are created as ../../common/foo.gfontXXX.gif. Use this
feature to direct the images to a particular directory. Additionally using a "base="""
attribute leads to images which are so-called hidden Unix files or dot-files.

And for most flexibility when no base is specified and the variable "GFONT_BASE" is
defined (usually from within a .wmlrc file via "-DGFONT_BASE~path/to/gfont/dir/base")
it is used. Use this feature to redirect the created images to a particular
directory.

You may also use the variable "IMAGE_BASE" which defines in a single line all base
names for images generated by WML.

file=filename
Use this to explicitly set the output filename for the GIF image. This is usually not
used, because you don't need to know the actual filename. But sometimes it can be
useful to explicitly set it.

notag
This forces "<gfont>" to expand to nothing, i.e. no resulting "<img>" tag. The image
itself is still generated. In combination with the above "file" attribute this can be
used to generate images to particular files which can be used at other positions, for
instance inside "<rollover>" (see wml::des::rollover(3)) tags.

color=#rrggbb
Sets the font (foreground) color. Default is "#000000" which is black.

bgcolor=#rrggbb
Sets the image background color. Default is no color at all, i.e. transparent
background.

face=fontname
Sets the type of the used font where fontname is actually any TeX-available font or a
name alias from the Fontmap file of gFONT. See gfont(1) for more details. Default is
"Times".

size=number
Sets the relative size of the font, similar to the HTML 3.2 "<font<" tag. Default is
0. The following correspondence to pt-sizes exists:

size: -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
pt: 12 16 20 32 40 50 60 80 100 120 140 160

This leads to nearly the same font sizes for "<font>" and "<gfont>" tags on typical
browser setups.

align=location
This directly corresponds to the "align" attribute of the "<img>" tag.

crop
This indicates that the image should be cropped, i.e. the edges containing only the
background color should be removed.

adjust=spec
This passes through spec to the -r option of gFONT which adjusts the size of the final
image. Use this to expand the image and/or align it.

:img:ATTR=STR
The ``ATTR=STR'' pairs are passed along to the "<img>" HTML tag.

EXAMPLE

        <gfont face="HelveticaBold" size=+6 color="#3333cc">
        A sample Headerline
        </gfont>

AUTHOR

        Ralf S. Engelschall
        rse@engelschall.com
        www.engelschall.com

REQUIRES

        Internal: P1, P2, P3, Image::Size (P5M)
        External: gfont (PATH)