The GDTextUtil package contains text utilities for use with the GD
drawing package. 

This package provides three modules that make it possible to work with
internal GD fonts as well as TrueType fonts, without having to worry
about different interface functions to call. Apart from an abstract
interface to all font types and strings for GD, this library also
provides some utility in aligning and wrapping your string.

GD::Text:
    Provides information about a font, irrespective of whether the font
    is a TTF or builtin font.

GD::Text::Align
    Align a string around a coordinate, left, right, center, top, bottom
    or center.

GD::Text::Wrap
    Wrap a long string between a right and left margin, starting at a
    certain y coordinate. Layout the text flush left, flush right,
    center, or justified.

Requirements:

    perl 5.005_03 or higher. It may (and probably will) work on older
    versions, but it has not been tested, and I won't spend a lot of
    time trying to support it.

    GD 1.20 or up, if possible built with TTF (freetype) support.
    GD 2.* has not been tested yet.

    Please note that the freetype version 2 libraries should be at
    the latest level. Especially version 2.0.3 has an annoying bug
    that rotates text twice. Later versions of freetype (2.1.2
    currently) don't render as nicely anymore as earlier ones.
    Hopefully that will be fixed, because it is _ugly_ right now.

    If you want 'make test' to do something useful, you will need
    to have Test::More installed. If you don't, all tests will be
    skipped.

Installation:

    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make demo
    make install

Demo(s) can be found in the demo directory.

    DO NOT PANIC when the tests fail. The various Freetype libraries
    often have a slightly different implementation of their rendering
    algorithms, resulting in slightly different bounding boxes for
    strings, and slightly different looking images. If your tests
    fail, try a 'make demo', and visually compare demo/GDWrap.png
    (freshly generated image) and demo/GDWrap.ref.png (reference
    image). If they look reasonably similar, you can call the tests
    successful. Even if they don't look entirely similar, it may
    simply be because your font files are different from the ones I
    used to create GDWrap.ref.png. Please see the sources.

    Currently, some of the TTF tests in t/* are disabled, specifically
    because every version of the freetype library seems to render
    differently enough for sizing to be wrong all the time. I don't
    think I'll ever re-enable them anymore.

Bug Reports:

    When you report a bug, please include as much information as
    possible (unless you also supply a patch :)).
    The minimum set of information I need to be able to correctly
    assess a bug is:

        GD::Text version
        Perl version and OS
        GD version

    If the bug relates to TrueType font rendering, I'll also need to
    know which version freetype library you linked in.

    If at all possible, submit a small program that demonstrates the
    problem, together with the output _you_ get on your system
    (remember that it all works fine on mine).

    If you're using Redhat, and have their freetype 2.0.3 library RPM
    installed, do not report bugs until you have upgraded to a later
    version.

    CYGWIN

    If you try to install the GD::Text modules on cygwin, you may see
    error messages like the following:

    C:\cygwin\bin\cygperl.exe: *** unable to remap 
        C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\libfreetype.dll to same address as 
        parent(0x720000) != 0x74000064 [main] cygperl 4296 sync_with_child: 
        child 4364(0xFC) died before initialization with status code 0x1

    It has been brought to my attention (by Michael West) that in this
    case it is necessary to "rebase" the used libraries (Don't ask me,
    I don't know what that means). There is some more info on the
    cygwin mailing list:

    http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2003-02/msg01484.html
    http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2003-02/msg01789.html
    http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2003-02/msg01833.html

Todo:

    - Make the interface more flexible
    - Alignment for the wrap boxes as a whole
    - More demo code
    
COPYRIGHT

    Copyright (c) 1999 Martien Verbruggen
    mgjv@comdyn.com.au

    This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
    modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Enclosed fonts: 

    Dustismo Sans and Dustismo Roman
    http://www.cheapskatefonts.com/
    see Dustismo,LICENSE for original (GPL) license

    Cetus by Greg Meronek is no longer enclosed, since its copyright
    status has become unclear (the status is simply not known).
    http://fontastic.i-n.net/fontastic/greg.htm