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)
SEE ALSO¶
HTML "<font>" tag,
gfont(1),
http://www.engelschall.com/sw/gfont/