[Wylug-discuss] PHP font utility

[roger]

Announcing a new (if pretty trivial) PHP utility.

Since I couldn't find a _simple_ tool to reformat an image file as a PHP
font (for use with the imageloadfont() function), I wrote a PHP script that
does just that.  It ain't very clever, but it works on my system (and
provides for the different "endian-ness" on x86 (etc) and 68k (etc) systems).

It's primitive (no UI, just edit the run-time parameters into the script),
but I've tried to provide decent progress- and error-reporting.  It depends
on having a .bmp file (grey-scale expected) of the glyphs.  Having said
that, it did my job, so it does work (under PHP with Apache) - I've
successfully used it to create 2 fixed-width, bit-mapped fonts.

I'm benefiting enormously from Linux & the open source movement, so, for
what it's worth, I'd like to pay a bit back.  I've published the code
(internally documented) at http://www.beaunet.force9.co.uk/gpl/ (GPL
license applies). The HTML page there provides links to tar-ball and zip
archives, plus uncompressed versions of the script, a brief .txt
description and a screen-dump (showing it running in Firebird).

As I say, it's done the job I wanted, so I haven't much interest in
developing it further myself, but others might want to play to give it a
decent front end, or to check (and fix?) it under the PHP CLI - or make
other improvements I haven't thought of.

I've submitted it to freshmeat, and intend to do the same with sourceforge,
but it may well be too trivial for those heavyweights.

FWIW, it's open to all (as per GPL).


Good networking,

Roger Beaumont