1998.02.13 21:44 "Re: Text to tiff?", by Alberto Accomazzi

I wish to annotate an existing bitonal TIFF with text, under Unix.

I'm prepared to merge TIFFs made from text with existing images, but I'd certainly welcome any knowledge of a tool that is intended for annotation.

Are there alternatives to netpbm tools for rendering text as a TIFF graphic? I need multi-line, multi-font capabilities and some scalability or a reasonable selection of sizes; and it would be nice if I could just state the resolution I want in the target image. Proportional and exotic fonts are not required.

Randy,

your best bet is to let ghostscript (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost) do the job in terms of rendering the text and createing a TIFF G4 file. Assuming you can have the textual information in a snipped to postscript code, you can then let ghostscript encapsulate it and then output a tiff file including only what's in the postscript bounding box.

You could even take this a step further, by converting the original image (the one to be annotated) to postscript (as a bitmap), let ghostscript rasterize it, overlay the annotation on it, and then write it out as a TIFF G4 file. May be a bit obstruse, but it should work.

-- Alberto

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Alberto Accomazzi                 NASA Astrophysics Data System / SIMBAD USA
aaccomazzi@cfa.harvard.edu             Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
v/f: 617-495-7076/617-496-7577                60 Garden Street, Mail Stop 83
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~alberto                 Cambridge, MA 02138  USA
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