1Pbmtext User Manual(0) Pbmtext User Manual(0)
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6 pbmtext - render text into a PBM image
7
10 pbmtext [-wchar] [-font fontfile] [-builtin fontname] [-space pixels]
11 [-lspace pixels] [-nomargins] [-width pixels] [-text-dump] [text]
12 Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use dou‐
14 ble hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote options. You may use
15 white space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from
16 its value.
17
21 This program is part of Netpbm(1).
22 pbmtext takes the specified text, either a single line from the command
24 line or multiple lines from standard input, and renders it into a PBM
25 graphical image.
26 The text rendered is all the non-option command line arguments, sepa‐
28 rated by spaces, except that if there are no non-option command line
29 arguments, it is Standard Input.
30 In the image, each line of input is a line of output. Formatting char‐
33 acters such as newline have no effect on the formatting; like any
34 unprintable character, they turn into spaces.
35 The image is just wide enough for the longest line of text, plus mar‐
37 gins, and just high enough to contain the lines of text, plus margins.
38 The left and right margins are twice the width of the widest character
40 in the font; the top and bottom margins are the height of the tallest
41 character in the font. But if the text is only one line, all the mar‐
42 gins are half of this. You can use the -nomargins option to eliminate
43 the margins.
44 pbmtext renders left to right. It cannot render vertically or right to
46 left.
47 pbmtextps does the same thing as pbmtext, but uses Ghostscript to gen‐
49 erate the characters, which means you can use Postscript fonts. But it
50 also means you have to have Ghostscript installed and it isn't as fast.
51 Also, pbmtextps generates only one line of text, whereas pbmtext can
52 create multiple lines.
53 pbmtext is meant for simple text. If you're working with a document,
55 you would be better off using a document formatting program to "print"
56 to a Postscript file, then feeding that Postscript to pstopnm.
57
60 -wchar
61 By default, pbmtext takes a single-byte character stream as
63 input. When you specify -wchar, it treats input text as a
64 multibyte character stream encoded according to the current
65 locale. Normally, the user would supply a BDF font file encoded
66 in ISO-10646-1 with a -font option.
67 With -wchar, you cannot supply the text on the command line; it
69 must be fed from standard input.
70 This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
72 -font
76 -builtin
78 -builtin selects a font among those built into Netpbm.
79 -font selects a font that you supply yourself either as an X
81 Window System BDF (Bitmap Distribution Format)
82 ⟨http://xfree86.org/current/bdf.pdf⟩ file or as a PBM file in a
83 special form.
84 The default is the built in font "bdf."
86 "bdf" is Times-Roman 15 pixels high. (That's about 14 point
88 type printed at 75 dpi).
89 "fixed" is a built in fixed width font.
91 For information about other fonts, and how to make one of your
93 own, see Fonts ⟨#fonts⟩ below.
94 -space pixels
98 Add pixels pixels of space between characters. This is in
99 addition to whatever space surrounding characters is built into
100 the font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable string
101 of text.
102 pixels may be fractional, in which case the number of pixels
104 added varies so as to achieve the specified average. For exam‐
105 ple -space=1.5 causes half the spaces to be 1 pixel and half to
106 be 2 pixels.
107 pixels may be negative to crowd text together, but the author
109 has not put much thought or testing into how this works in every
110 possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
111 -lspace pixels
114 Add pixels pixels of space between lines. This is in addition
115 to whatever space above and below characters is built into the
116 font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable line spac‐
117 ing.
118 pixels must be a whole number.
120 pixels may be negative to crowd lines together, but the author
122 has not put much thought or testing into how this works in every
123 possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
124 -nomargins
127 By default, pbmtext adds margins all around the image as
128 described above. This option causes pbmtext not to add any mar‐
129 gins.
130 Note that there may still be space beyond the edges of the type
132 because a character itself may include space at its edges. To
133 eliminate all surrounding background, so the type touches all
134 four edges of the image, use pnmcrop.
135 -width pixels
138 This specifies how much horizontal space the text is supposed to
139 fit into.
140 If the input is one line, pbmtext breaks it into multiple lines
142 as needed to fit the specified width. It breaks it between
143 characters, but does not pay attention to white space; it may
144 break in the middle of a word and a line may begin or end with
145 white space.
146 If the input is multiple lines, pbmtext assumes you already have
148 line breaks where they make sense, and pbmtext simply truncates
149 each line as needed to fit the specified width.
150 -text-dump
153 This option causes pbmtext just to write to Standard Output the
154 text in ASCII that would be rendered. The output reflects any
155 text formatting, unprintable character substitution, tab expan‐
156 sion, etc. It is for diagnosing problems. This option was new
157 in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
158 When -wchar is in effect, the output text will be in the encod‐
160 ing specified by the current locale.
161
167 Often, you want to place text over another image. One way to do this
168 is with ppmlabel. For more flexible (but complex) drawing of text on
169 an image, there is ppmdraw. These do not give you the font options
170 that pbmtext does, though.
171 Another way is to use pbmtext to create an image containing the text,
173 then use pamcomp to overlay the text image onto your base image. To
174 make only the text (and not the entire rectangle containing it) cover
175 the base image, you will need to give pamcomp a mask, via its -alpha
176 option. You can just use the text image itself as the mask, as long as
177 you also specify the -invert option to pamcomp.
178 If you want to overlay colored text instead of black, just use ppm‐
180 change to change all black pixels to the color of your choice before
181 overlaying the text image. But still use the original black and white
182 image for the transparency mask.
183 If you want the text at an angle, use pnmrotate on the text image (and
185 transparency mask) before overlaying.
186
189 There are three kinds of fonts you an use with pbmtext:
190 · built in
194 · BDF
196 · PBM
198 Built In Fonts
202 There are two built in fonts: bdf and fixed. You select these fonts
203 with a -builtin option.
204 bdf is the default when you specify no font information on the command
206 line. The naming reflects the fact that it shares many characteristics
207 of BDF style fonts. When this font was implemented, pbmtext did not
208 have the ability to read arbitrary BDF fonts specified by the -font
209 option. There is no external font file involved.
210 bdf is encoded in ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1, 8-bit). In addition to English
212 it can handle most West European languages (Spanish, French, German,
213 Swedish ...) This set lacks the Euro currency sign.
214 fixed is ASCII (7-bit) only.
216 While it is not an error to do so, you should not use the above built-
218 in fonts with -wchar.
219 BDF Font
223 BDF is an ancient font format that at one time was standard for the X
224 Window System. Now, you don't see it very often, but you can find some
225 BDF fonts on the Xfree86
226 ⟨http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/xc/fonts/bdf/⟩ web site.
227 You can get the full package of the BDF fonts from XFree86 (see above)
229 from the Netpbm web site ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩ .
230 PBM Font
233 To create a font as a PBM file (to use with the -font option), you just
234 create a PBM image of the text matrix below.
235 The first step is to display text matrix below on the screen, e.g. in
237 an X11 window.
238 M ",/^_[`jpqy| M
241 / !"#$%&'()*+ /
243 < ,-./01234567 <
244 > 89:;<=>?@ABC >
245 @ DEFGHIJKLMNO @
246 _ PQRSTUVWXYZ[ _
247 { \]^_`abcdefg {
248 } hijklmnopqrs }
249 ~ tuvwxyz{|}~ ~
250 M ",/^_[`jpqy| M
252 Make sure it's a fixed width font -- This should display as a perfect
255 rectangle.
256 Also, try to use a simple display program. Pbmtext divides this into a
258 matrix of cells, all the same size, each containing one character, so
259 it is important that whatever you use to display it display with uni‐
260 form horizontal and vertical spacing. Fancy word processing programs
261 sometimes stretch characters in both directions to fit certain dimen‐
262 sions, and that won't work. Sometimes a display program scales a font
263 to show a character larger or smaller than its natural size. That too
264 won't often work because the rounding involved in such scaling causes
265 non-uniform distances between characters.
266 If you display the text matrix improperly, the usual symptom is that
268 when you try to use the font, pbmtext fails with an error message
269 telling you that the number of lines in the font isn't divisible by 11,
270 or it can't find the blank band around the inner rectangle. Sometimes
271 the symptom is that one of the characters displays with a piece of the
272 character that is next to it in the matrix. For example, "l" might
273 display with a little piece of the "m" attached on its right.
274 Do a screen grab or window dump of that text, using for instance xwd,
276 xgrabsc, or screendump. Convert the result into a pbm file. If neces‐
277 sary, use pamcut to remove anything you grabbed in addition to the text
278 pictured above (or be a wimp and use a graphical editor such as Gimp).
279 Finally, run it through pnmcrop to make sure the edges are right up
280 against the text. pbmtext can figure out the sizes and spacings from
281 that.
282 There are some historical computer fonts, such as that used by the
284 original IBM PC, in the form that you can screen-grab and turn into a
285 PBM font file available from Stewart C Russell" (1). There are fonts
286 with various duodecimal digit glyphs at
287 treisara.deviantart.com
288 ⟨http://treisaran.deviantart.com/gallery/38695571/NetPBM-Fonts⟩ .
289 PBM fonts cannot be used with -wchar.
291
296 In the past, English text was encoded in 7-bit ASCII. 8-bit and multi‐
297 byte encodings were needed only for non-English languages. This is not
298 the case today. As of this writing, 90% of all web pages are encoded
299 in UTF-8. While many of them are actually restricted to 7-bit ASCII,
300 which is a subset of UTF-8, English text encoded in UTF-8 commonly
301 employs "66 99" style quotation marks, which do not appear in ASCII.
302 If your input text is UTF-8, you should use -wchar. You may have to
304 tweak the locale setting. pbmtext recognizes code points up to 65535.
305 This is sufficient for the vast majority of text written in modern lan‐
306 guages.
307 In the default single-byte (or "narrow") character mode, pbmtext can
309 handle 7-bit and 8-bit character sets. Examples are ASCII, ISO 8859
310 family, koi8-r/u and VISCII. It is up to the user to supply a BDF file
311 covering the necessary glyphs with the "-font" option. The font file
312 must be in the right encoding.
313 pbmtext does not inspect the encoding of the font file.
315
319 If you get garbled output, check the input text encoding and font file
320 encoding. When using -wchar, also check the current locale.
321 To convert the encoding of a text file, use iconv or luit.
323 To check the encoding of a BDF file, examine the CHARSET_REGISTRY line
325 and the next line, which should be CHARSET_ENCODING:
326 $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-a.bdf
328 CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO8859"
329 CHARSET_ENCODING "1"
330 $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-b.bdf
332 CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO10646"
333 CHARSET_ENCODING "1"
334 The latter is Unicode. BDF files coded in ISO 16046-1 usually work for
336 Western European languages, because ISO 16046-1 expands ISO 8859-1
337 (also called "Latin-1") while maintaining the first 256 code points.
338 ISO 8859-1 itself is a superset of ASCII. Run the above command and
339 verify the necessary glyphs are present.
340 IMPORTANT: For input text, a different rule applies. If you feed ISO
342 8859-1 text to pbmtext -wchar set up for UTF-8, the output will be gar‐
343 bled. Unicode provides several encoding schemes and different ones are
344 in effect for input text and font. The difference between Unicode
345 codepoint and the various encodings is a formidable stumbling block;
346 beware of web pages that get the concept wrong.
347 75% of the BDF files in the font collection available from the Netpbm
349 website ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩ are in ISO
350 10646-1. Many have the Euro sign, Greek letters, etc., but they are
351 placed at code points available to pbmtext only with -wchar.
352 Before pbmtext had the -wchar option, one often had to produce a BDF
354 file in an 8-bit encoding from a master BDF file encoded in ISO
355 10646-1.
356 There are several programs that perform BDF encoding conversion. If
358 you have the X Window System installed, first look for ucs2any. If you
359 don't, you can download ucs2any.pl from Unicode fonts and tools for
360 X11" (1). This website has much useful information on fonts.
361 Another converter is trbdf, included in the "trscripts" package, avail‐
363 able in some GNU/Linux distributions.
364 BDF files encoded in ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-7, koi8-r, etc. are available
366 from ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup" (1) and its sister page The Cyrillic
367 Charset Soup" (1). Though the information is dated, these pages give a
368 good overview of 8-bit character sets.
369 To convert OTF or TTF font files to BDF, use
371 otf2bdf by Mike Leisher
372 ⟨http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/Software/otf2bdf⟩ .
373
377 pbmtextps(1), pamcut(1), pnmcrop(1), pamcomp(1), ppmchange(1), pnmro‐
378 tate(1), ppmlabel(1), ppmdraw(1), pstopnm(1), pbm(1), Pango
379 ⟨http://www.pango.org⟩ , Cairo ⟨http://cairographics.org⟩
380
383 Copyright (C) 1993 by Jef Poskanzer and George Phillips
384
386 This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML
387 source. The master documentation is at
388 http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtext.html
390netpbm documentation 25 March 2018 Pbmtext User Manual(0)