[Image-SIG] Re: PIL-compatible fonts -- 200dpi, 250dpi, 300dpi, ...and beyond

[kcazabon]

Actually, a week or two ago, Joerg Baumann posted a patch for PIL that
allowed you to use the FreeType2 engine to render fonts into PIL format
on-the-fly.  This, I see as the perfect solution, once FreeType2 is
buildable on all major platforms.

Fred:  is there any problem building that patch into PIL, with whatever
modifications necessary to allow you to load the FreeType2 library from a
configurable directory (or maybe just somewhere on the system path or
PythonPath?

Currently, that library is only supported on Linux, although I havent tried
building it myself.

Kevin.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Randall Hopper" <aa8vb@yahoo.com>
To: "kcazabon" <kcazabon@home.com>
Cc: <image-sig@python.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2000 6:36 AM
Subject: Re: PIL-compatible fonts -- 200dpi, 250dpi, 300dpi, ...and beyond


> Ok.  Makes sense.
>
> You know I was thinking last night.  XFree86 (the X distribution that's
> provided with FreeBSD, Linux, etc.) now provides true-type-capable X
> servers that'll use TrueType font files directly.
>
> With these X servers, you can use TTFs just as you can conventional X
> fonts.  For example, I use the Verdana TTF in Netscape under FreeBSD for
> web browsing.
>
> Since with X you can render fonts into off-screen pixmaps, I wonder if
> anyone has built (or has thought of building) a Python-/PIL- back-end to
> interface with the standard X font API?
>
> ...or maybe this is already supported.  (I'm just now starting to use PIL,
> so I don't know.)
>
> Thanks again for the TTF conversions, Kevin.
>
> --
> Randall Hopper
> aa8vb@yahoo.com
>
> kcazabon:
>  |The script to convert BDF files to PIL format is available in the
standard
>  |distribution (PilFont.py).  I modified it a bit to automate it for my
>  |purposes though.  The 'real' trick was getting all my fonts into BDF
format
>  |first.
>  |
>  |To do that, I purchased a program called "FonMaker" that converts
Windows
>  |fonts (Type 1 and TT) to BDF.  It's $99 USD, available at
>  |http://www.fontlab.com.  I have a HUGE library of Windows fonts, but
>  |converting them will just take too much space.
>  |
>  |Randall Hopper:
>  |>
>  |> Some of these are pretty large files.  Rather than archive them, would
you
>  |> care to share your script so that they could be generated on the fly?
Or
>  |> is that something you'd rather not do.
>  |>
>  |> kcazabon:
>  |>  |Piers Lauder was kind enough to provide FTP space for the packages I
>  |>  |created.  They're available at:
>  |>  |
>  |>  |http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~piers/python/pilfonts.html