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, preferably 5.6. 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.

	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.

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.

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 font: 
    Cetus by Greg Meronek, downloaded from http://www.fontpool.com/

