1Pbmtext User Manual(0) Pbmtext User Manual(0)
2
6 pbmtext - render text into a PBM image
7
10 pbmtext [-font fontfile] [-builtin fontname] [-space pixels] [-lspace
11 pixels] [-nomargins] [-width pixels] [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 In the image, each line of input is a line of output. Formatting char‐
28 acters such as newline have no effect on the formatting; like any
29 unprintable character, they turn into spaces.
30 The image is just wide enough for the longest line of text, plus mar‐
32 gins, and just high enough to contain the lines of text, plus margins.
33 The left and right margins are twice the width of the widest character
35 in the font; the top and bottom margins are the height of the tallest
36 character in the font. But if the text is only one line, all the mar‐
37 gins are half of this. You can use the -nomargins option to eliminate
38 the margins.
39 pbmtextps does the same thing as pbmtext, but uses Ghostscript to gen‐
41 erate the characters, which means you can use Postscript fonts. But it
42 also means you have to have Ghostscript installed and it isn't as fast.
43 Also, pbmtextps generates only one line of text, whereas pbmtext can
44 create multiple lines.
45 pbmtext is meant for small quantities of simple text. If you're work‐
47 ing with a document, you would be better off using a document format‐
48 ting program to 'print' to a Postscript file, then feeding that Post‐
49 script to pstopnm.
50
53 -font
54 -builtin
56 -builtin selects a font among those built into Netpbm.
57 -font selects a font that you supply yourself either as an X
59 Window System BDF (Bitmap Distribution Format)
60 ⟨http://xfree86.org/current/bdf.pdf⟩ file or as a PBM file in a
61 special form.
62 The default is the built in font 'bdf.'
64 'bdf' is Times-Roman 15 pixels high. (That's about 14 point
66 type printed at 75 dpi).
67 'fixed' is a built in fixed width font.
69 For information about other fonts, and how to make one of your
71 own, see Fonts ⟨#fonts⟩ below.
72 -space pixels
76 Add pixels pixels of space between characters. This is in
77 addition to whatever space surrounding characters is built into
78 the font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable string
79 of text.
80 pixels may be fractional, in which case the number of pixels
82 added varies so as to achieve the specified average. For exam‐
83 ple -space=1.5 causes half the spaces to be 1 pixel and half to
84 be 2 pixels.
85 pixels may be negative to crowd text together, but the author
87 has not put much thought or testing into how this works in every
88 possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
89 -lspace pixels
92 Add pixels pixels of space between lines. This is in addition
93 to whatever space above and below characters is built into the
94 font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable line spac‐
95 ing.
96 pixels must be a whole number.
98 pixels may be negative to crowd lines together, but the author
100 has not put much thought or testing into how this works in every
101 possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
102 -nomargins
105 By default, pbmtext adds margins all around the image as
106 described above. This option causes pbmtext not to add any mar‐
107 gins.
108 Note that there may still be space beyond the edges of the type
110 because a character itself may include space at its edges. To
111 eliminate all surrounding background, so the type touches all
112 four edges of the image, use pnmcrop.
113 -width pixels
116 This specifies how much horizontal space the text is supposed to
117 fit into.
118 If the input is one line, pbmtext breaks it into multiple lines
120 as needed to fit the specified width. It breaks it between
121 characters, but does not pay attention to white space; it may
122 break in the middle of a word and a line may begin or end with
123 white space.
124 If the input is multiple lines, pbmtext assumes you already have
126 line breaks where they make sense, and pbmtext simply truncates
127 each line as needed to fit the specified width.
128
134 Often, you want to place text over another image. One way to do this
135 is with ppmlabel. For more flexible (but complex) drawing of text on
136 an image, there is ppmdraw. These do not give you the font options
137 that pbmtext does, though.
138 Another way is to use pbmtext to create an image containing the text,
140 then use pamcomp to overlay the text image onto your base image. To
141 make only the text (and not the entire rectangle containing it) cover
142 the base image, you will need to give pamcomp a mask, via its -alpha
143 option. You can just use the text image itself as the mask, as long as
144 you also specify the -invert option to pamcomp.
145 If you want to overlay colored text instead of black, just use ppm‐
147 change to change all black pixels to the color of your choice before
148 overlaying the text image. But still use the original black and white
149 image for the alpha mask.
150 If you want the text at an angle, use pnmrotate on the text image (and
152 alpha mask) before overlaying.
153
156 There are three kinds of fonts you an use with pbmtext:
157 · built in
161 · BDF
163 · PBM
165 Built In Fonts
169 There are two built in fonts: bdf and fixed. You select these fonts
170 with a -builtin option.
171 bdf is the default when you specify no font information on the command
173 line.
174 bdf is encoded in ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1, 8-bit). In addition to English
176 it can handle most West European languages (Spanish, French, German,
177 Swedish ...) This set lacks the Euro currency sign.
178 fixed is ASCII (7-bit) only.
180 BDF Font
184 BDF is an ancient font format that at one time was standard for the X
185 Window System. Now, you don't see it very often, but you can find some
186 BDF fonts on the Xfree86
187 ⟨http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/xc/fonts/bdf/⟩ web site.
188 You can get the full package of the BDF fonts from XFree86 (see above)
190 from the Netpbm web site ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩ .
191 PBM Font
194 To create a font as a PBM file (to use with the -font option), you just
195 create a PBM image of the text matrix below.
196 The first step is to display text matrix below on the screen, e.g. in
198 an X11 window.
199 M ',/^_[`jpqy| M
202 / !'#$%&'()*+ /
204 < ,-./01234567 <
205 > 89:;<=>?@ABC >
206 @ DEFGHIJKLMNO @
207 _ PQRSTUVWXYZ[ _
208 { \]^_`abcdefg {
209 } hijklmnopqrs }
210 ~ tuvwxyz{|}~ ~
211 M ',/^_[`jpqy| M
213 Make sure it's a fixed width font -- This should display as a perfect
216 rectangle.
217 Also, try to use a simple display program. Pbmtext divides this into a
219 matrix of cells, all the same size, each containing one character, so
220 it is important that whatever you use to display it display with uni‐
221 form horizontal and vertical spacing. Fancy word processing programs
222 sometimes stretch characters in both directions to fit certain dimen‐
223 sions, and that won't work. Sometimes a display program scales a font
224 to show a character larger or smaller than its natural size. That too
225 won't often work because the rounding involved in such scaling causes
226 non-uniform distances between characters.
227 If you display the text matrix improperly, the usual symptom is that
229 when you try to use the font, pbmtext fails with an error message
230 telling you that the number of lines in the font isn't divisible by 11,
231 or it can't find the blank band around the inner rectangle. Sometimes
232 the symptom is that one of the characters displays with a piece of the
233 character that is next to it in the matrix. For example, 'l' might
234 display with a little piece of the 'm' attached on its right.
235 Do a screen grab or window dump of that text, using for instance xwd,
237 xgrabsc, or screendump. Convert the result into a pbm file. If neces‐
238 sary, use pamcut to remove anything you grabbed in addition to the text
239 pictured above (or be a wimp and use a graphical editor such as
240 ImageMagick). Finally, run it through pnmcrop. to make sure the edges
241 are right up against the text. pbmtext can figure out the sizes and
242 spacings from that.
243
247 pbmtext does little to accomodate the special needs of non-English
248 text.
249 pbmtext reads input in byte units. Unicode (utf-7, utf-8, utf-16,
251 etc.) text which contains multibyte characters does not work.
252 pbmtext can handle 7-bit and 8-bit character sets. Examples are ASCII,
254 ISO 8859 family, koi8-r/u and VISCII. It is up to the user to supply a
255 BDF file covering the necessary glyphs with the "-font" option. The
256 font file must be in the right encoding.
257 pbmtext does not recognize locale. It ignores the associated environ‐
259 ment variables.
260 pbmtext cannot render vertically or right to left.
262
266 If you get garbled output, check whether the font file encoding corre‐
267 sponds to the input text encoding. Also make sure that your input is
268 not in utf-* or any other mutli-byte format.
269 To dump characters in a BDF font file run this command:
271 $ awk 'BEGIN { for (i=0x01; i<=0xFF; i++)
273 { printf('%c%s',i,i%16==15 ? '\n':''); } }' |\
274 pbmtext -f font.bdf > dump.pbm
275 If you need only ASCII, change the for statement to:
277 for (i=0x20; i<=0x7E; i++)
279 To check the encoding of a BDF file, examine the CHARSET_REGISTRY line
281 and the next line, which should be CHARSET_ENCODING:
282 $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-a.bdf
284 CHARSET_REGISTRY 'ISO8859'
285 CHARSET_ENCODING '1'
286 $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-b.bdf
288 CHARSET_REGISTRY 'ISO10646'
289 CHARSET_ENCODING '1'
290 The latter is Unicode. BDF files coded in ISO 16046-1 usually work for
292 Western European languages, because ISO 16046-1 expands ISO 8859-1
293 (also called 'Latin-1') while maintaining the first 256 code points.
294 ISO 8859-1 itself is a superset of ASCII. Run the above command and
295 verify the necessary glyphs are present.
296 It may sound strange that pbmtext accepts font files encoded in Unicode
298 but not input text in Unicode. This is because Unicode provides sev‐
299 eral 'numbering schemes'.
300 When rendering text in character sets other than ISO 8859-1, one often
302 has to produce a BDF file in the given encoding from a master BDF file
303 encoded in ISO 10646-1.
304 In particular, 75% of the BDF files in the font collection available
306 from the Netpbm website ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩
307 are in ISO 10646-1. Many have the Euro sign, Greek letters, etc, but
308 they are placed in code points beyond what pbmtext sees.
309 There are several programs that perform BDF encoding conversion. If
311 you have the X Window System installed, first look for ucs2any. If you
312 don't, you can download ucs2any.pl from Unicodefontsandtools for X11
313 (1). This website has much useful information on fonts.
314 Another converter is trbdf, included in the 'trscripts' package, avail‐
316 able in some GNU/Linux distributions.
317 BDF files encoded in ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-7, koi8-r, etc. are available
319 from ISO8859Alphabet Soup (1) and its sister page TheCyrillicCharset
320 Soup (1). Though the information is dated, these pages give a good
321 overview of 8-bit character sets.
322 To convert OTF or TTF font files to BDF, use
324 otf2bdf by Mike Leisher
325 ⟨http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/Software/otf2bdf⟩ .
326
330 pbmtextps(1), pamcut(1), pnmcrop(1), pamcomp(1), ppmchange(1), pnmro‐
331 tate(1), ppmlabel(1), ppmdraw(1), pstopnm(1), pbm(1), Pango
332 ⟨http://www.pango.org⟩ , Cairo ⟨http://cairographics.org⟩
333
336 Copyright (C) 1993 by Jef Poskanzer and George Phillips
337netpbm documentation 14 June 2010 Pbmtext User Manual(0)