NAME

a2png - convert ASCII text to PNG bitmap image

SYNOPSIS

a2png [ options ] [ file(s) ]

DESCRIPTION

a2png reads text from files or standard input and renders them to a PNG bitmap image. The first version is pretty simple, and will only handle newlines, carriage returns and tabs -- ANSI schemes is not supported.

The Cairo graphics library is used for rendering the file in memory.

OPTIONS

-

Read text from standard input

--background=...

Set background color. The format is the same as for HTML/CSS, i.e. aabbcc, in RGB values. Default is black (000000).

--bold

Use bold font.

--charspacing=...

Set horizontal spacing between characters in pixels. Default is 0. You can also use negative.

--fixed

Make any font fixed-width by using the horizontal spacing of the widest character in the Latin1 character set.

--font=...

Set font family to use. You can either point directly to a font file, as in --font=myfont.ttf, or simply the name "myfont" if that font exists as myfont.ttf or myfont.ttc in the default font search path.

If you want to use a font in your current directory, you must specify it like this: --font=./fontname.ttf

You can also set your own font search path with a comma delimited list in the environment variable GDFONTPATH, if you are using gdlib for rendering.

If you have ghostscript installed, you can do a `which gs' and investigate that path's share/ghostscript/fonts/, e.g. /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/. If you find any ghostscript fonts, you can try using one of them. Check out the file `Fontmap' in that directory for descriptive names for those fonts.

Both Cairo and GD use Freetype as a font subsystem, so you can try some fonts with that distribution. The --font parameter can hence read any fonts that Freetype can handle, so you can try with almost any font formats (including truetype fonts).

If you are using Cairo, then a lot of fonts like "Fixed" are shipped with the installation. In that case, you cannot use GDFONTPATH.

In most cases you will want to use a monospaced font, such as `Courier' or `Courier New'. If you don't have any monospaced font, you can emulate the behaviour by using the option --fixed.

--font-size=...

Set font size. Note that you cannot use pixels or pt here. The size is a floating point value, defaulting to 0.025.

--foreground=...

Set foreground color. The format is the same as for HTML/CSS, i.e. aabbcc, in RGB values. Default is white (ffffff).

--format=...

Set PNG pixel format. Available values are ARGB32 (default), RGB24 and A8 (alpha values, 8 bits per pixel).

--height=...

Set output height in pixels. Default is 480.

--html-input

Unfortunately this is probably not what you are looking for. This program will *not* render HTML pages. Instead, it reads the exact format that is output from the program jp2a using the options `--colors --html-raw' (see http://jp2a.sourceforge.net for more information on jp2a).

This is used to color the characters. For reference, the format is this:

The <br/> is used to break lines. No newlines are accepted, and the code to parse this input is extremely bad, so you shouldn't get your hopes up for this one.

--help -h

Print help.

--linespacing=...

Sets amount of extra pixels to add between each line. The default is to add 2 pixels. You can set this to zero, or even negative values.

--no-crop

Do not crop away the unused image areas after rendering the text.

--output=...

Set output filename or a directory to write the files to.

--overwrite

Overwrite existing files. The default is not to overwrite, instead adding a numbered suffix to the filename. That is, if you convert foo.txt you get foo.png the first time you convert. The second time you'll get foo2.png and so on.

--verbose

Print verbose output messages. This is useful when you want to know the cropping dimensions, and when converting multiple files to see their output names.

--width=...