Chinese text GIF file generation
hungjunglu at yahoo.com
hungjunglu at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 11 17:59:37 EST 2001
--- In python-list at y..., William Park <parkw at b...> wrote:
> Because there is so many variables (ie. font, style, size, ...), I
don't
> think there is package that does what you want. However, you can
use
> LaTeX to produce Postscript format, and then convert it into GIF.
There surely are existing packages. Just visit any of the Chinese
news portals (e.g: www.sinanet.com) and you'll see what I mean.
Unlike Korean or Japanese, or even Vietnamese, for Chinese websites,
it is usually a better idea to present text in GIF than in multi-byte
encoding schemes. The thing is, there is a big need out there for
real-time or quasi-real-time on-the-fly GIF generation of Chinese
text in GIF format. Anything that involves an intermediate manual
process is unacceptable. (Besides, it's easy to do it manually on any
PC: screen capture + format conversion and you are done. It's just
time-consuming.) For websites containing multiple foreign languages
in the USA, text-to-gif converters is a real necessity: you don't
want to show jibberish to your visitors.
Writing these packages in Java is a bit involved, but not that hard.
I am pretty sure that the C library has been written, since someone
else has mentioned it to me a long time ago. Imagine the number of
Chinese computer geeks out there: it is unthinkable that this thing
has not been done. (Of course there might be legal issues with GIF,
but PNG will be fine.)
Hung Jung
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