Possibly insane use for PHP: Dynamic text replacement. I thought Mark, at least, would be interested in this.
I've thought about simpler versions of what he's doing. Tapping into PHP's capability to access type face libraries would give the bumpersticker generator much more user control.
After going through the pain of adding another font to the beta2 version of the bumpersticker generator (bsg), I think I may use this guy's scripts as a guide to using OTF for the bsg. Otherwise adding bold, non-narrow, lowercase, different sizes, etc., will be entirely too painful.
He claims that the script needs PHP 4.3 support to work, which he.net doesn't have on tulip. But I suspect that's just because he's using transparency. I think I can work around that.
By the way, do you know how well supported PNG is these days? JPEG is a sucky format for graphics, and GIF output isn't an option.
It's pretty widely supported. I don't think it will be a problem. Still, people don't use it much. I think it's more inertia than a real problem.
I went through the PHP code. Whew! Lots of new stuff to assimilate. I think I can use this as a starting point. I don't want or need the java portion, so I'll ignore it.
The only part that's a bit fuzzy is the handling of special characters. If I stay within the alphanumeric, there are no issues. But dealing with escape sequences looks like a tricky area. I'm already seeing bugs with the beta2 version. (Any text after a $ just doesn't get processed.) And I think I'd like to have unicode support to allow multilingual Bush bashing.
I found a free-ware typeface family (Oregon LDO) that's similar to the commercial font I've been using for the "hand made" bumperstickers. But I may stick to the commercial font due to completeness of character set (umlauts and such).
Well, this took entirely too long. Turns out that the GD TTF functions want the absofuckinglylutely literal path to the TTF file. Start with /home and go from there. Don't bring none of that tilde stuff. Don't even think about ./filename.
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- jim 6-30-2004 8:33 pm
I've thought about simpler versions of what he's doing. Tapping into PHP's capability to access type face libraries would give the bumpersticker generator much more user control.
- mark 6-30-2004 11:54 pm
After going through the pain of adding another font to the beta2 version of the bumpersticker generator (bsg), I think I may use this guy's scripts as a guide to using OTF for the bsg. Otherwise adding bold, non-narrow, lowercase, different sizes, etc., will be entirely too painful.
He claims that the script needs PHP 4.3 support to work, which he.net doesn't have on tulip. But I suspect that's just because he's using transparency. I think I can work around that.
By the way, do you know how well supported PNG is these days? JPEG is a sucky format for graphics, and GIF output isn't an option.
- mark 7-01-2004 10:57 pm
It's pretty widely supported. I don't think it will be a problem. Still, people don't use it much. I think it's more inertia than a real problem.
- jim 7-01-2004 11:31 pm
I went through the PHP code. Whew! Lots of new stuff to assimilate. I think I can use this as a starting point. I don't want or need the java portion, so I'll ignore it.
The only part that's a bit fuzzy is the handling of special characters. If I stay within the alphanumeric, there are no issues. But dealing with escape sequences looks like a tricky area. I'm already seeing bugs with the beta2 version. (Any text after a $ just doesn't get processed.) And I think I'd like to have unicode support to allow multilingual Bush bashing.
I found a free-ware typeface family (Oregon LDO) that's similar to the commercial font I've been using for the "hand made" bumperstickers. But I may stick to the commercial font due to completeness of character set (umlauts and such).
- mark 7-02-2004 5:41 am
Well, this took entirely too long. Turns out that the GD TTF functions want the absofuckinglylutely literal path to the TTF file. Start with /home and go from there. Don't bring none of that tilde stuff. Don't even think about ./filename.
- mark 7-02-2004 11:57 am