Manual: pbmtext
Pbmtext User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pbmtext User Manual(1)
NAME
pbmtext - render text into a PBM image
SYNOPSIS
pbmtext [-wchar] [-font fontfile] [-builtin fontname] [-space pixels] [-lspace pixels] [-nomargins] [-width pixels]
[-load-entire-font] [-verbose] [-dry-run] [-text-dump] [text]
Minimum unique abbreviation of option is acceptable. You may use double hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote
options. You may use white space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from its value.
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pbmtext takes the specified text, either a single line from the command line or multiple lines from standard input,
and renders it into a PBM graphical image.
The text rendered is all the non-option command line arguments, separated by spaces, except that if there are no non-
option command line arguments, it is Standard Input.
In the image, each line of input is a line of output. Lines are
delimited by newline characters.
The program renders any character in an input line that is not in the font
as a space. Note that control characters usually aren't in the font, but
some fonts have glyphs for them. The newline characters that delimit lines
in of Standard Input are not in any line.
Tab characters are rendered as a number of spaces; any entry in the font
for the tab code point is irrelevant. The number of spaces is such as to
create tab stops every 8 characters. Note that this is not useful if the
font is proportional.
The image is just wide enough for the longest line of text, plus margins, and just high enough to contain the lines
of text, plus margins.
The left and right margins are twice the width of the widest character in the font; the top and bottom margins are
the height of the tallest character in the font. But if the text is only one line, all the margins are half of this.
You can use the -nomargins option to eliminate the margins.
pbmtext renders left to right. It cannot render vertically or right to left.
pbmtextps does the same thing as pbmtext, but uses Ghostscript to generate the characters, which means you can use
Postscript fonts. But it also means you have to have Ghostscript installed and it isn't as fast. Also, pbmtextps
generates only one line of text, whereas pbmtext can create multiple lines.
pbmtext is meant for simple text. If you're working with a document, you would be better off using a document forā
matting program to "print" to a Postscript file, then feeding that Postscript to pstopnm.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see Common Options ),
pbmtext recognizes the following command line options:
-wchar
By default, pbmtext takes a single-byte character stream as input. When you specify -wchar, it treats input
text as a multibyte character stream encoded according to the current locale. Normally, the user would supply
a BDF font file encoded in ISO-10646-1 with a -font option.
With -wchar, you cannot supply the text on the command line; it must be fed from standard input.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
-font
-builtin
-builtin selects a font among those built into Netpbm.
-font selects a font that you supply yourself either as an X Window System BDF (Bitmap Distribution Format)
file or as a PBM file in a special form.
The default is the built in font "bdf."
"bdf" is Times-Roman 15 pixels high. (That's about 14 point type printed at 75 dpi).
"fixed" is a built in fixed width font.
For information about other fonts, and how to make one of your own, see Fonts below.
-space pixels
Add pixels pixels of space between characters. This is in addition to whatever space surrounding characters
is built into the font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable string of text.
pixels may be fractional, in which case the number of pixels added varies so as to achieve the specified averā
age. For example -space=1.5 causes half the spaces to be 1 pixel and half to be 2 pixels.
pixels may be negative to crowd text together, but the author has not put much thought or testing into how
this works in every possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
-lspace pixels
Add pixels pixels of space between lines. This is in addition to whatever space above and below characters
is built into the font, which is usually enough to produce a reasonable line spacing.
pixels must be a whole number.
pixels may be negative to crowd lines together, but the author has not put much thought or testing into how
this works in every possible case, so it might cause disastrous results.
-nomargins
By default, pbmtext adds margins all around the image as described above. This option causes pbmtext not to
add any margins.
Note that there may still be space beyond the edges of the type because a character itself may include space
at its edges. To eliminate all surrounding background, so the type touches all four edges of the image, use
pnmcrop.
-width pixels
This specifies how much horizontal space the text is supposed to fit into.
If the input is one line, pbmtext breaks it into multiple lines as needed to fit the specified width. It
breaks it between characters, but does not pay attention to white space; it may break in the middle of a word
and a line may begin or end with white space.
If the input is multiple lines, pbmtext assumes you already have line breaks where they make sense, and pbmā
text simply truncates each line as needed to fit the specified width.
-load-entire-font
When you use a BDF font, pbmtext will normally load from the font
only the characters needed for your text, not wasting time loading other
characters. With this option, pbmtext will instead read the entire
font. It won't make any difference in the rendered output, but it lets
you check the integrity of the font file.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.91 (June 2020). Before that, pbmtext always reads the entire font.
-verbose
This makes pbmtext issue informtional messages about its processing.
-dry-run
With this option, instead of outputting an image of the text, pbmtext just writes to Standard Output a message
telling the dimensions of the image it would have produced.
You can specify only one of -dry-run and -text-dump.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.75 (June 2016).
-text-dump
This option causes pbmtext just to write to Standard Output the text in ASCII that would be rendered. The
output reflects any text formatting, unprintable character substitution, tab expansion, etc. It is for diagā
nosing problems. This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
When -wchar is in effect, the output text will be in the encoding specified by the current locale.
You can specify only one of -dry-run and -text-dump.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.82 (March 2018).
USAGE
Often, you want to place text over another image. One way to do this is with ppmlabel. For more flexible (but comā
plex) drawing of text on an image, there is ppmdraw. These do not give you the font options that pbmtext does,
though.
Another way is to use pbmtext to create an image containing the text, then use pamcomp to overlay the text image onto
your base image. To make only the text (and not the entire rectangle containing it) cover the base image, you will
need to give pamcomp a mask, via its -alpha option. You can just use the text image itself as the mask, as long as
you also specify the -invert option to pamcomp.
If you want to overlay colored text instead of black, just use ppmchange to change all black pixels to the color of
your choice before overlaying the text image. But still use the original black and white image for the transparency
mask.
If you want the text at an angle, use pnmrotate on the text image (and transparency mask) before overlaying.
FONTS
There are three kinds of fonts you an use with pbmtext:
ā¢ built in
ā¢ BDF
ā¢ PBM
Built In Fonts
There are two built in fonts: bdf and fixed. You select these fonts with a -builtin option.
bdf is the default when you specify no font information on the command line. The naming reflects the fact that it
shares many characteristics of BDF style fonts. When this font was implemented, pbmtext did not have the ability to
read arbitrary BDF fonts specified by the -font option. There is no external font file involved.
bdf is encoded in ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1, 8-bit). In addition to English it can handle most West European languages
(Spanish, French, German, Swedish ...) This set lacks the Euro currency sign.
fixed is ASCII (7-bit) only.
While it is not an error to do so, you should not use the above built-in fonts with -wchar.
BDF Font
BDF is an ancient font format that at one time was standard for the X Window System. Now, you don't see it very ofā
ten. Until about 2024, you could find some BDF fonts on the Xfree86 web site. Today, you can get the full package
of the BDF fonts from XFree86 from the Netpbm web site .
PBM Font
To create a font as a PBM file (to use with the -font option), you just create a PBM image of the text matrix below.
The first step is to display text matrix below on the screen, e.g. in an X11 window.
M ",/^_[`jpqy| M
/ !"#$%&'()*+ /
< ,-./01234567 <
> 89:;<=>?@ABC >
@ DEFGHIJKLMNO @
_ PQRSTUVWXYZ[ _
{ \]^_`abcdefg {
} hijklmnopqrs }
~ tuvwxyz{|}~ ~
M ",/^_[`jpqy| M
Make sure it's a fixed width font -- This should display as a perfect rectangle.
Also, try to use a simple display program. Pbmtext divides this into a matrix of cells, all the same size, each conā
taining one character, so it is important that whatever you use to display it display with uniform horizontal and
vertical spacing. Fancy word processing programs sometimes stretch characters in both directions to fit certain diā
mensions, and that won't work. Sometimes a display program scales a font to show a character larger or smaller than
its natural size. That too won't often work because the rounding involved in such scaling causes non-uniform disā
tances between characters.
If you display the text matrix improperly, the usual symptom is that when you try to use the font, pbmtext fails with
an error message telling you that the number of lines in the font isn't divisible by 11, or it can't find the blank
band around the inner rectangle. Sometimes the symptom is that one of the characters displays with a piece of the
character that is next to it in the matrix. For example, "l" might display with a little piece of the "m" attached
on its right.
Do a screen grab or window dump of that text, using for instance xwd, xgrabsc, or screendump. Convert the result
into a pbm file. If necessary, use pamcut to remove anything you grabbed in addition to the text pictured above (or
be a wimp and use a graphical editor such as Gimp). Finally, run it through pnmcrop to make sure the edges are right
up against the text. pbmtext can figure out the sizes and spacings from that.
There are some historical computer fonts, such as that used by the original IBM PC, in the form that you can screen-
grab and turn into a PBM font file available from Stewart C Russell" (1). There are fonts with various duodecimal
digit glyphs at treisara.deviantart.com .
PBM fonts cannot be used with -wchar.
MULTI-BYTE INPUT
In the past, English text was encoded in 7-bit ASCII. 8-bit and multibyte encodings were needed only for non-English
languages. This is not the case today. As of this writing, 90% of all web pages are encoded in UTF-8. While many
of them are actually restricted to 7-bit ASCII, which is a subset of UTF-8, English text encoded in UTF-8 commonly
employs "66 99" style quotation marks, which do not appear in ASCII.
If your input text is UTF-8, you should use -wchar. You may have to tweak the locale setting. pbmtext recognizes
code points up to 65535. This is sufficient for the vast majority of text written in modern languages.
In the default single-byte (or "narrow") character mode, pbmtext can handle 7-bit and 8-bit character sets. Examples
are ASCII, ISO 8859 family, koi8-r/u and VISCII. It is up to the user to supply a BDF file covering the necessary
glyphs with the "-font" option. The font file must be in the right encoding.
pbmtext does not inspect the encoding of the font file.
LIMITATIONS
If the text is from Standard Input, no line may be longer than 4999 characters. If one is, the program aborts with
an appropriate error message.
If the text is from Standard Input and contains a null character, the results are abnormal. Lines may be truncated,
and a single line may be considered multiple lines. Normal text does not contain null characters, so this isn't a
big problem.
TIPS
If you get garbled output, check the input text encoding and font file encoding. When using -wchar, also check the
current locale.
To convert the encoding of a text file, use iconv or luit.
To check the encoding of a BDF file, examine the CHARSET_REGISTRY line and the next line, which should be CHARSET_ENā
CODING:
$ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-a.bdf
CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO8859"
CHARSET_ENCODING "1"
$ grep -A1 CHARSET_REGISTRY font-b.bdf
CHARSET_REGISTRY "ISO10646"
CHARSET_ENCODING "1"
The latter is Unicode. BDF files coded in ISO 16046-1 usually work for Western European languages, because ISO
16046-1 expands ISO 8859-1 (also called "Latin-1") while maintaining the first 256 code points. ISO 8859-1 itself is
a superset of ASCII. Run the above command and verify the necessary glyphs are present.
IMPORTANT: For input text, a different rule applies. If you feed ISO 8859-1 text to pbmtext -wchar set up for UTF-8,
the output will be garbled. Unicode provides several encoding schemes and different ones are in effect for input
text and font. The difference between Unicode codepoint and the various encodings is a formidable stumbling block;
beware of web pages that get the concept wrong.
75% of the BDF files in the font collection available from the Netpbm website are in ISO 10646-1. Many have the
Euro sign, Greek letters, etc., but they are placed at code points available to pbmtext only with -wchar.
Before pbmtext had the -wchar option, one often had to produce a BDF file in an 8-bit encoding from a master BDF file
encoded in ISO 10646-1.
There are several programs that perform BDF encoding conversion. If you have the X Window System installed, first
look for ucs2any. If you don't, you can download ucs2any.pl from Unicode fonts and tools for X11" (1). This website
has much useful information on fonts.
Another converter is trbdf, included in the "trscripts" package, available in some GNU/Linux distributions.
BDF files encoded in ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-7, koi8-r, etc. are available from ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup" (1) and its sisā
ter page The Cyrillic Charset Soup" (1). Though the information is dated, these pages give a good overview of 8-bit
character sets.
To convert OTF or TTF font files to BDF, use otf2bdf by Mike Leisher or otftobdf (part of the libotf package, which
is part of the m17n project).
SEE ALSO
pbmtextps(1), pamcut(1), pnmcrop(1), pamcomp(1), ppmchange(1), pnmrotate(1), ppmlabel(1), ppmdraw(1), pstopnm(1),
pbm(1), Pango , Cairo
AUTHOR
Copyright (C) 1993 by Jef Poskanzer and George Phillips
DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source. The master documentation is at
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtext.html
netpbm documentation 29 May 2020 Pbmtext User Manual(1)