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 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.

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