hjp: Programs: ppmbutton

ppmbutton and roxenfont

Render Truetype or X11 fonts to pixmaps.

ppmbutton creates ppm images of a string rendered in a given font with some button-like decorations. I don't use this much any more since the web server Roxen can do this on the fly now. Instead I wrote

roxenfont , which converts a complete truetype file to the format understood by Roxen, which is basically a pgm image of each character together with an index all in one file.

To compile these programs, you will also need the ant library and a GNUmakerules file .

man page (HTMLized)
ppmbutton-2.1.5.tar.gz 1998-05-11
This fixes a few bugs in option handling. It also contains workarounds for two common bugs in TTF files: Reversed contours and a bogus charmap entry for character 65535.
Support for X11 fonts in roxenfont is still missing, although it should be rather easy to add. I probably also should throw out all the truetype code and replace it with code from FreeType or Xfstt .
ppmbutton-2.1.4.tar.gz 1997-11-19
This is a "timeout release". I haven't worked on it for some time, and the previous release is now almost 6 months old, so I figured I should make a new release to get all the changes I made since then out of the door. This release adds a new option --id, so that you can use MacIntosh and Symbol fonts. Be warned however, that the codes are probably not what you expect. There are also some bug fixes and cleanups. These programs still don't grok quite a lot of fonts, but these fonts look broken, so won't bother trying to work around the quirks in those fonts until I (or somebody else) finds a really neat font which cannot be converted.
ppmbutton-2.1.3.tar.gz 1997-05-29
Version 2.1.3 (Yeah, I know I can't count) is another bug-fix release. 2.1.1 interpreted all offsets in composite characters as unsigned, which wasn't exactly a good idea. It has also been compiled on on more systems (Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, OSF/1), so you shouldn't have many problems in getting it to run.
ppmbutton-2.1.1.tar.gz 1997-04-16
Version 2.1.1 is a bug-fix release for 2.1.0. If some characters looked very funny with older versions, try this one.
ppmbutton-2.1.0.tar.gz 1997-03-23
Version 2.1.0 also contains a little program called roxenfont , which can convert a truetype font to the font format understood by the Roxen web server. This is currently definitely in alpha stage.
ppmbutton-2.0.tar.gz 1996-10-06
Version 2.0 can render truetype fonts in addition to X11 fonts. An X server is needed only to get X11 font bitmaps, all other processing is done by the program itself. This should improve both the output quality and the speed of the program. The truetype support is still somewhat patchy: Only a few truetype formats are supported, kerning and hinting information is ignored.