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)