Possibly insane use for PHP: Dynamic text replacement. I thought Mark, at least, would be interested in this.
- 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





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