1Pbmtext User Manual(0) Pbmtext User Manual(0)
2
6 pbmtext - render text into a PBM image
7
10 pbmtext [-wchar] [-font fontfile] [-builtin fontname] [-space pixels]
11 [-lspace pixels] [-nomargins] [-width pixels] [-load-entire-font]
12 [-verbose] [-dry-run] [-text-dump] [text]
13 Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use dou‐
15 ble hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote options. You may use
16 white space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from
17 its value.
18
22 This program is part of Netpbm(1).
23 pbmtext takes the specified text, either a single line from the command
25 line or multiple lines from standard input, and renders it into a PBM
26 graphical image.
27 The text rendered is all the non-option command line arguments, sepa‐
29 rated by spaces, except that if there are no non-option command line
30 arguments, it is Standard Input.
31 In the image, each line of input is a line of output. Lines are
34 delimited by newline characters.
35 The program renders any character in an input line that is not in the
37 font
38 as a space. Note that control characters usually aren't in the font,
39 but
40 some fonts have glyphs for them. The newline characters that delimit
41 lines
42 in of Standard Input are not in any line.
43 Tab characters are rendered as a number of spaces; any entry in the
45 font
46 for the tab code point is irrelevant. The number of spaces is such
47 as to
48 create tab stops every 8 characters. Note that this is not useful if
49 the
50 font is proportional.
51 The image is just wide enough for the longest line of text, plus mar‐
54 gins, and just high enough to contain the lines of text, plus margins.
55 The left and right margins are twice the width of the widest character
57 in the font; the top and bottom margins are the height of the tallest
58 character in the font. But if the text is only one line, all the mar‐
59 gins are half of this. You can use the -nomargins option to eliminate
60 the margins.
61 pbmtext renders left to right. It cannot render vertically or right to
63 left.
64 pbmtextps does the same thing as pbmtext, but uses Ghostscript to gen‐
66 erate the characters, which means you can use Postscript fonts. But it
67 also means you have to have Ghostscript installed and it isn't as fast.
68 Also, pbmtextps generates only one line of text, whereas pbmtext can
69 create multiple lines.
70 pbmtext is meant for simple text. If you're working with a document,
72 you would be better off using a document formatting program to "print"
73 to a Postscript file, then feeding that Postscript to pstopnm.
74
77 In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
78 (most notably -quiet, see
79 Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ ), pbmtext recognizes the
80 following command line options:
81 -wchar
86 By default, pbmtext takes a single-byte character stream as
88 input. When you specify -wchar, it treats input text as a
89 multibyte character stream encoded according to the current
90 locale. Normally, the user would supply a BDF font file encoded
91 in ISO-10646-1 with a -font option.
92 With -wchar, you cannot supply the text on the command line; it
94 must be fed from standard input.
95 This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
97 -font
101 -builtin
103 -builtin selects a font among those built into Netpbm.
104 -font selects a font that you supply yourself either as an X
106 Window System BDF (Bitmap Distribution Format)
107 ⟨http://xfree86.org/current/bdf.pdf⟩ file or as a PBM file in a
108 special form.
109 The default is the built in font "bdf."
111 "bdf" is Times-Roman 15 pixels high. (That's about 14 point
113 type printed at 75 dpi).
114 "fixed" is a built in fixed width font.
116 For information about other fonts, and how to make one of your
118 own, see Fonts ⟨#fonts⟩ below.
119 -space pixels
123 Add pixels pixels of space between characters. This is in
124 addition to whatever space surrounding characters is built into
125 the font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable string
126 of text.
127 pixels may be fractional, in which case the number of pixels
129 added varies so as to achieve the specified average. For exam‐
130 ple -space=1.5 causes half the spaces to be 1 pixel and half to
131 be 2 pixels.
132 pixels may be negative to crowd text together, but the author
134 has not put much thought or testing into how this works in every
135 possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
136 -lspace pixels
139 Add pixels pixels of space between lines. This is in addition
140 to whatever space above and below characters is built into the
141 font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable line spac‐
142 ing.
143 pixels must be a whole number.
145 pixels may be negative to crowd lines together, but the author
147 has not put much thought or testing into how this works in every
148 possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
149 -nomargins
152 By default, pbmtext adds margins all around the image as
153 described above. This option causes pbmtext not to add any mar‐
154 gins.
155 Note that there may still be space beyond the edges of the type
157 because a character itself may include space at its edges. To
158 eliminate all surrounding background, so the type touches all
159 four edges of the image, use pnmcrop.
160 -width pixels
163 This specifies how much horizontal space the text is supposed to
164 fit into.
165 If the input is one line, pbmtext breaks it into multiple lines
167 as needed to fit the specified width. It breaks it between
168 characters, but does not pay attention to white space; it may
169 break in the middle of a word and a line may begin or end with
170 white space.
171 If the input is multiple lines, pbmtext assumes you already have
173 line breaks where they make sense, and pbmtext simply truncates
174 each line as needed to fit the specified width.
175 -load-entire-font
178 When you use a BDF font, pbmtext will normally load from the
180 font
181 only the characters needed for your text, not wasting time
182 loading other
183 characters. With this option, pbmtext will instead read the
184 entire
185 font. It won't make any difference in the rendered output,
186 but it lets
187 you check the integrity of the font file.
188 This option was new in Netpbm 10.91 (June 2020). Before that,
190 pbmtext always reads the entire font.
191 -verbose
194 This makes pbmtext issue informtional messages about its pro‐
195 cessing.
196 -dry-run
199 With this option, instead of outputting an image of the text,
201 pbmtext just writes to Standard Output a message telling the
202 dimensions of the image it would have produced.
203 You can specify only one of -dry-run and -text-dump.
205 This option was new in Netpbm 10.75 (June 2016).
207 -text-dump
210 This option causes pbmtext just to write to Standard Output the
211 text in ASCII that would be rendered. The output reflects any
212 text formatting, unprintable character substitution, tab expan‐
213 sion, etc. It is for diagnosing problems. This option was new
214 in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
215 When -wchar is in effect, the output text will be in the encod‐
217 ing specified by the current locale.
218 You can specify only one of -dry-run and -text-dump.
220 This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
222
228 Often, you want to place text over another image. One way to do this
229 is with ppmlabel. For more flexible (but complex) drawing of text on
230 an image, there is ppmdraw. These do not give you the font options
231 that pbmtext does, though.
232 Another way is to use pbmtext to create an image containing the text,
234 then use pamcomp to overlay the text image onto your base image. To
235 make only the text (and not the entire rectangle containing it) cover
236 the base image, you will need to give pamcomp a mask, via its -alpha
237 option. You can just use the text image itself as the mask, as long as
238 you also specify the -invert option to pamcomp.
239 If you want to overlay colored text instead of black, just use ppm‐
241 change to change all black pixels to the color of your choice before
242 overlaying the text image. But still use the original black and white
243 image for the transparency mask.
244 If you want the text at an angle, use pnmrotate on the text image (and
246 transparency mask) before overlaying.
247
250 There are three kinds of fonts you an use with pbmtext:
251 · built in
255 · BDF
257 · PBM
259 Built In Fonts
263 There are two built in fonts: bdf and fixed. You select these fonts
264 with a -builtin option.
265 bdf is the default when you specify no font information on the command
267 line. The naming reflects the fact that it shares many characteristics
268 of BDF style fonts. When this font was implemented, pbmtext did not
269 have the ability to read arbitrary BDF fonts specified by the -font
270 option. There is no external font file involved.
271 bdf is encoded in ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1, 8-bit). In addition to English
273 it can handle most West European languages (Spanish, French, German,
274 Swedish ...) This set lacks the Euro currency sign.
275 fixed is ASCII (7-bit) only.
277 While it is not an error to do so, you should not use the above built-
279 in fonts with -wchar.
280 BDF Font
284 BDF is an ancient font format that at one time was standard for the X
285 Window System. Now, you don't see it very often, but you can find some
286 BDF fonts on the Xfree86
287 ⟨http://cvsweb.xfree86.org/cvsweb/xc/fonts/bdf/⟩ web site.
288 You can get the full package of the BDF fonts from XFree86 (see above)
290 from the Netpbm web site ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩ .
291 PBM Font
294 To create a font as a PBM file (to use with the -font option), you just
295 create a PBM image of the text matrix below.
296 The first step is to display text matrix below on the screen, e.g. in
298 an X11 window.
299 M ",/^_[`jpqy| M
302 / !"#$%&'()*+ /
304 < ,-./01234567 <
305 > 89:;<=>?@ABC >
306 @ DEFGHIJKLMNO @
307 _ PQRSTUVWXYZ[ _
308 { \]^_`abcdefg {
309 } hijklmnopqrs }
310 ~ tuvwxyz{|}~ ~
311 M ",/^_[`jpqy| M
313 Make sure it's a fixed width font -- This should display as a perfect
316 rectangle.
317 Also, try to use a simple display program. Pbmtext divides this into a
319 matrix of cells, all the same size, each containing one character, so
320 it is important that whatever you use to display it display with uni‐
321 form horizontal and vertical spacing. Fancy word processing programs
322 sometimes stretch characters in both directions to fit certain dimen‐
323 sions, and that won't work. Sometimes a display program scales a font
324 to show a character larger or smaller than its natural size. That too
325 won't often work because the rounding involved in such scaling causes
326 non-uniform distances between characters.
327 If you display the text matrix improperly, the usual symptom is that
329 when you try to use the font, pbmtext fails with an error message
330 telling you that the number of lines in the font isn't divisible by 11,
331 or it can't find the blank band around the inner rectangle. Sometimes
332 the symptom is that one of the characters displays with a piece of the
333 character that is next to it in the matrix. For example, "l" might
334 display with a little piece of the "m" attached on its right.
335 Do a screen grab or window dump of that text, using for instance xwd,
337 xgrabsc, or screendump. Convert the result into a pbm file. If neces‐
338 sary, use pamcut to remove anything you grabbed in addition to the text
339 pictured above (or be a wimp and use a graphical editor such as Gimp).
340 Finally, run it through pnmcrop to make sure the edges are right up
341 against the text. pbmtext can figure out the sizes and spacings from
342 that.
343 There are some historical computer fonts, such as that used by the
345 original IBM PC, in the form that you can screen-grab and turn into a
346 PBM font file available from Stewart C Russell" (1). There are fonts
347 with various duodecimal digit glyphs at
348 treisara.deviantart.com
349 ⟨http://treisaran.deviantart.com/gallery/38695571/NetPBM-Fonts⟩ .
350 PBM fonts cannot be used with -wchar.
352
357 In the past, English text was encoded in 7-bit ASCII. 8-bit and multi‐
358 byte encodings were needed only for non-English languages. This is not
359 the case today. As of this writing, 90% of all web pages are encoded
360 in UTF-8. While many of them are actually restricted to 7-bit ASCII,
361 which is a subset of UTF-8, English text encoded in UTF-8 commonly
362 employs "66 99" style quotation marks, which do not appear in ASCII.
363 If your input text is UTF-8, you should use -wchar. You may have to
365 tweak the locale setting. pbmtext recognizes code points up to 65535.
366 This is sufficient for the vast majority of text written in modern lan‐
367 guages.
368 In the default single-byte (or "narrow") character mode, pbmtext can
370 handle 7-bit and 8-bit character sets. Examples are ASCII, ISO 8859
371 family, koi8-r/u and VISCII. It is up to the user to supply a BDF file
372 covering the necessary glyphs with the "-font" option. The font file
373 must be in the right encoding.
374 pbmtext does not inspect the encoding of the font file.
376
380 If the text is from Standard Input, no line may be longer than 4999
381 characters. If one is, the program aborts with an appropriate error
382 message.
383 If the text is from Standard Input and contains a null character, the
385 results are abnormal. Lines may be truncated, and a single line may be
386 considered multiple lines. Normal text does not contain null charac‐
387 ters, so this isn't a big problem.
388
392 If you get garbled output, check the input text encoding and font file
393 encoding. When using -wchar, also check the current locale.
394 To convert the encoding of a text file, use iconv or luit.
396 To check the encoding of a BDF file, examine the CHARSET_REGISTRY line
398 and the next line, which should be CHARSET_ENCODING:
399 $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-a.bdf
401 CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO8859"
402 CHARSET_ENCODING "1"
403 $ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-b.bdf
405 CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO10646"
406 CHARSET_ENCODING "1"
407 The latter is Unicode. BDF files coded in ISO 16046-1 usually work for
409 Western European languages, because ISO 16046-1 expands ISO 8859-1
410 (also called "Latin-1") while maintaining the first 256 code points.
411 ISO 8859-1 itself is a superset of ASCII. Run the above command and
412 verify the necessary glyphs are present.
413 IMPORTANT: For input text, a different rule applies. If you feed ISO
415 8859-1 text to pbmtext -wchar set up for UTF-8, the output will be gar‐
416 bled. Unicode provides several encoding schemes and different ones are
417 in effect for input text and font. The difference between Unicode
418 codepoint and the various encodings is a formidable stumbling block;
419 beware of web pages that get the concept wrong.
420 75% of the BDF files in the font collection available from the Netpbm
422 website ⟨http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/bdffont.tgz⟩ are in ISO
423 10646-1. Many have the Euro sign, Greek letters, etc., but they are
424 placed at code points available to pbmtext only with -wchar.
425 Before pbmtext had the -wchar option, one often had to produce a BDF
427 file in an 8-bit encoding from a master BDF file encoded in ISO
428 10646-1.
429 There are several programs that perform BDF encoding conversion. If
431 you have the X Window System installed, first look for ucs2any. If you
432 don't, you can download ucs2any.pl from Unicode fonts and tools for
433 X11" (1). This website has much useful information on fonts.
434 Another converter is trbdf, included in the "trscripts" package, avail‐
436 able in some GNU/Linux distributions.
437 BDF files encoded in ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-7, koi8-r, etc. are available
439 from ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup" (1) and its sister page The Cyrillic
440 Charset Soup" (1). Though the information is dated, these pages give a
441 good overview of 8-bit character sets.
442 To convert OTF or TTF font files to BDF, use
444 otf2bdf by Mike Leisher
445 ⟨http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~mleisher/Software/otf2bdf⟩ .
446
450 pbmtextps(1), pamcut(1), pnmcrop(1), pamcomp(1), ppmchange(1), pnmro‐
451 tate(1), ppmlabel(1), ppmdraw(1), pstopnm(1), pbm(1), Pango
452 ⟨http://www.pango.org⟩ , Cairo ⟨http://cairographics.org⟩
453
456 Copyright (C) 1993 by Jef Poskanzer and George Phillips
457
459 This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML
460 source. The master documentation is at
461 http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtext.html
463netpbm documentation 29 May 2020 Pbmtext User Manual(0)