The GDTextUtil package contains text utilities for use with the GD drawing package.

This package provides three modules that make it possible to work with internal GD fonts as well as TrueType fonts, without having to worry about different interface functions to call. Apart from an abstract interface to all font types and strings for GD, this library also provides some utility in aligning and wrapping your string.

GD::Text: Provides information about a font, irrespective of whether the font is a TTF or builtin font.

GD::Text::Align Align a string around a coordinate, left, right, center, top, bottom or center.

GD::Text::Wrap Wrap a long string between a right and left margin, starting at a certain y coordinate. Layout the text flush left, flush right, center, or justified.

Requirements:

perl 5.005_03 or higher. It may (and probably will) work on older
versions, but it has not been tested, and I won't spend a lot of
time trying to support it.

GD 1.20 or up, if possible built with TTF (freetype) support.
GD 2.* has not been tested yet.

Please note that the freetype version 2 libraries should be at
the latest level. Especially version 2.0.3 has an annoying bug
that rotates text twice. Later versions of freetype (2.1.2
currently) don't render as nicely anymore as earlier ones.
Hopefully that will be fixed, because it is _ugly_ right now.

If you want 'make test' to do something useful, you will need
to have Test::More installed. If you don't, all tests will be
skipped.

Installation:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make demo
make install

Demo(s) can be found in the demo directory.

DO NOT PANIC when the tests fail. The various Freetype libraries
often have a slightly different implementation of their rendering
algorithms, resulting in slightly different bounding boxes for
strings, and slightly different looking images. If your tests
fail, try a 'make demo', and visually compare demo/GDWrap.png
(freshly generated image) and demo/GDWrap.ref.png (reference
image). If they look reasonably similar, you can call the tests
successful. Even if they don't look entirely similar, it may
simply be because your font files are different from the ones I
used to create GDWrap.ref.png. Please see the sources.

Currently, some of the TTF tests in t/* are disabled, specifically
because every version of the freetype library seems to render
differently enough for sizing to be wrong all the time. I don't
think I'll ever re-enable them anymore.

Bug Reports:

When you report a bug, please include as much information as
possible (unless you also supply a patch :)).
The minimum set of information I need to be able to correctly
assess a bug is:

    GD::Text version
    Perl version and OS
    GD version

If the bug relates to TrueType font rendering, I'll also need to
know which version freetype library you linked in.

If at all possible, submit a small program that demonstrates the
problem, together with the output _you_ get on your system
(remember that it all works fine on mine).

If you're using Redhat, and have their freetype 2.0.3 library RPM
installed, do not report bugs until you have upgraded to a later
version.

CYGWIN

If you try to install the GD::Text modules on cygwin, you may see
error messages like the following:

C:\cygwin\bin\cygperl.exe: *** unable to remap 
    C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\libfreetype.dll to same address as 
    parent(0x720000) != 0x74000064 [main] cygperl 4296 sync_with_child: 
    child 4364(0xFC) died before initialization with status code 0x1

It has been brought to my attention (by Michael West) that in this
case it is necessary to "rebase" the used libraries (Don't ask me,
I don't know what that means). There is some more info on the
cygwin mailing list:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2003-02/msg01484.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2003-02/msg01789.html
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2003-02/msg01833.html

Todo:

- Make the interface more flexible
- Alignment for the wrap boxes as a whole
- More demo code

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 1999 Martien Verbruggen
mgjv@comdyn.com.au

This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Enclosed fonts:

Dustismo Sans and Dustismo Roman
http://www.cheapskatefonts.com/
see Dustismo,LICENSE for original (GPL) license

Cetus by Greg Meronek is no longer enclosed, since its copyright
status has become unclear (the status is simply not known).
http://fontastic.i-n.net/fontastic/greg.htm