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/